What if the coastal eyeglass manufacturer was the way in, not out of Wuhan for the virus?
I’m thinking its vastly more likely to have come from the research lab a couple hundred yards away which studied odd animal viruses and where bats kept attacking the researchers. I’d bet one of them frequented the animal market on his way home, and that was that. Lab workers who wrangle the test animals are often very young, and so “patient zero” probably just got through it like it was a bad flu or cold.
If my guess is right, Chinese officials or workers at the lab probably know who it was, and they covered it up so the outbreak wasn’t blamed on staggering government incompetence, from the handling of the animals to the decision to put a highly-dangerous disease lab in the heart of a major city. It would be much safer politically if the outbreak was blamed on the primitive practices of wild animal markets.
Part of my reasoning is the statistical unlikelihood that out of all the tens of thousands of wild animal markets in China, the disease first appeared in the one that was a couple of hundred yards from China’s “dangerous animal-virus” lab where they happened to keep bats, the species thought to be the pathway into the human population.
George, you are probably right about the virus, and the lack of other outbreaks supports your conclusions. But there are several tactical reasons, other than rampant stupidity, to put such a lab in a populated area. Most of them have to do with covering the movements and makeup of involved personnel. I am still not convinced we have seen and heard the truth about this virus. Too many officials are still walking around with that ‘deer in the headlights look’ for me to relax yet. I hope the experts get to the bottom of this soon.
This morning it’s being reported that the CDC went to Wuhan on January 8th but wasn’t told about the outbreak because Chinese officials were ordered to keep it a secret.
Yesterday there was an outbreak in an assisted living nursing home in Washington State, with something like 25 patients and 24 staff showing symptoms out of 108 residents and a very large number of staff. The facility is about a mile from the hospital where the cruise ship evacuee just died, and unless the coincidence is due to some mysterious ancient force that only Kolchak could figure out, it’s safe to say that the nursing home outbreak is directly do to sloppy medical procedures by personnel who were working at both sites.
Trump was very upset that the State Department flew American corona patients back home, and now I’d say that bad decision is almost certain to have led directly to this outbreak, and given the advanced age and poor health of the patients, it is almost certain to end in many American deaths.
CDC personnel were flying from Atlanta to Washington State to take charge of the disaster, and they’ve just put 24 first responders under quarantine. Yesterday the Daily Mail had photos of a first responder in a T-shirt, jeans, and a surgical mask loading a corona virus patient into an ambulance. At this point Chinese responders would have but on a full bio-hazard suit before even walking onto the grounds of the nursing home.
This level of casual sloppiness is going to prove disastrous, and it seems to keep recurring.
Oops. The patient who died in Washington State wasn’t one of the evacuees, he was a case of unknown origin.
It’s also just down the road from Bill Gates’ house. Which is odd given he was recently running simulations of a global pandemic.
from the research lab a couple hundred yards away
If I have the right coordinates, it’s more like 30 km away.
Recheck your coordinates. One end is out in a field somewhere. Going from “Wuhan Institute of Virology” to the “Wuhan South China Seafood Market” is 13 km, and pretty much a direct shot over the river.
That’s still a whole lot further than the “few blocks” I’d been reading. I should stop trusting anything written by journalists, or perhaps second-hand reports of what somebody said.
The reaction of the chinese government makes me think the origin was the lab and they know how dangerous it is.
On the other hand, as was pointed out by a caller to the Rush Limbaugh Show, we aren’t hearing much about the protests in Hong Kong these days. I’ll admit this seems like a real exercise in paranoia, but on the other hand, things have calmed considerably there. It would be unwise to think the ChiCom apparatchik haven’t taken note. If not this time, perhaps in the future.
What I’m sure they’ve particularly noticed is that China can handle an outbreak of killer disease, and the rest of the world can’t.
Of particular note: when your medicines or medical equipment are largely imported from China. Continuing this practice as business-as-usual may not be the wisest approach.
By “handle” meaning suppress information?
The coronvirus is not very significant.
In terms of, if consider “global warming” as significant, then this virus outbreak is very significant. Or compared to major Hurricanes, very significant on nations or the entire world.
As analogy the coronvirus {COVID-19} is high stakes gambling.
And China has lost and will loss more in the future. At present the dollar loss is tens of trillions of dollar and rest of world in total lost less than 1 trillion dollars.
But such costs are including vague stuff like opportunity losses and I will grant it’s uncertain and sort of assessing losses in high stake gambling game. Or in 5 years one could measure it better.
And other nations could loses more at to the moment and later losing a lot in the game.
One aspect is China loss might translate in better China “governing” which result in turning any loss into a big gain.
But big losers at this point seem to be China- and Japan and South Korea. And it could have a big effect upon Iran.
“Handle” as in quarantining millions of people and keeping the deaths down to an insignificant number by their standards.
If Trump tried to quarantine LA, a Democrat judge would issue an injunction before the ink was dry on the Executive Order.
The Chinese now know that, if they want to rule the world, all they need do is release a disease that’s as easy to spread as this one, but significantly more deadly.
It’s still too early to tell how widespread this outbreak will be world-wide. The numbers are not encouraging, but WHO hasn’t declared it a pandemic (yet). We seem to be holding to the 2% mortality rate, which seems to be afflicting those with complicating medical conditions more so that others. That figure does make it worse than the flu, if it holds that way in “developed” countries. China is in reality not that far back from “developed” these days. At least in the parts of the country where they are getting their statistics (that they are willing to share) from. So far, in the United States, 2% is accurate albeit with extremely small numbers of afflicted. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Other thing, is this “COVID-19 event” has proven {if this was needed} is that US is the superpower of the world.
And that China is not a superpower.
Of course, China is a big market, as is India.
As is Africa or Europe.
Much like the death of Epstein and spying on the Trump campaign, we will never know the truth about this.
I will give credit to the ChiComs for sharing the genome of this virus and getting it out fairly quickly. Their response this time will make it difficult not to do the same if they ever purposely release an “engineered” virus. Any hesitation to do so should be reasonably interpreted as an admission of guilt.
My assumption now is that this is beyond containment and probably was before we heard about it. As of last week there had only been 400 test performed in this country so it’s all but certain that it has been circulating for some time undetected.
If we quarantine LA, how would you propose to feed them? What about the drivers of the thousands of trucks every day that would take and the thousands of people making deliveries? It’s not like they will stop getting all the other things that keep the hospitals busy now.
We’ll all just have to take our chances and hope it’s no worse than the flu.
The Chinese confront the same reality, their response has been about as efficient as the last 100 years of communist governments should have led us to expect. The real hard to find number will be the number of healthy people that staved to death from their quarantine.
–My assumption now is that this is beyond containment and probably was before we heard about it–
It was beyond containment, before the Chinese locked down Wuhan.
Or 5 million had already left by time it was locked down- and lot of them left in trains {and train routes match the other cities which first got infected}.
What they did might have worked if they had acted faster. I would have stopped the trains, as the first immediate priority. And if not that, at least have every passenger wear a masks. Though insistence that every one wear a mask on the streets was pointless.
–As of last week there had only been 400 test performed in this country so it’s all but certain that it has been circulating for some time undetected.–
It’s possible. But it said about 10% has serious effects, and these serious cases would shown up in medical centers and medical staff would have been infected. And we would know about it. So only way it would make sense is having much lower rate of having serious effects, like 1% or less.
I believe only about 5% of cases from the cruise ship have proven serious, and that’s from a much older demographic. So it may turn out that a much smaller percentage have to be hospitalized in the West than in China.
Yeah, it could be about 1% or less.
But then that lowers the mortality.
The problem from the beginning was the uncertainty.
And only winning plan was to delay the spread until such time as we get more knowledge.
And it could be China didn’t do enough to delay it, but US probably did.
But we still need more time to find out more about it, so we still take all {reasonable} steps to delay it.
And gain the time to develop treatments and the longer time needed for a safe vaccine. Or if rush the vaccine, the vaccine could cause more harm than COVID-19.
It is unrealistic to think any virus can be stopped. Like SARS there is no effective means of quarantine with a virus that is communicable before you show symptoms, which is the case for most “successful” viruses. What is more important is the mortality rate. This strain is not that strong. This season’s flu strain has caused more deaths by a factor of ten than this virus. And no one has even mentioned that fact on any news network. Because that would waste a perfectly good crisis.
You don’t want to look at the total number of deaths but the % of those who died. A lot more people got the flu than corona virus. No one knows how many people died in China.
There are already enough cases outside of China to get that number. It is less than 1%. That population is made up mostly of people with compromised health.
What if the coastal eyeglass manufacturer was the way in, not out of Wuhan for the virus?
I’m thinking its vastly more likely to have come from the research lab a couple hundred yards away which studied odd animal viruses and where bats kept attacking the researchers. I’d bet one of them frequented the animal market on his way home, and that was that. Lab workers who wrangle the test animals are often very young, and so “patient zero” probably just got through it like it was a bad flu or cold.
If my guess is right, Chinese officials or workers at the lab probably know who it was, and they covered it up so the outbreak wasn’t blamed on staggering government incompetence, from the handling of the animals to the decision to put a highly-dangerous disease lab in the heart of a major city. It would be much safer politically if the outbreak was blamed on the primitive practices of wild animal markets.
Part of my reasoning is the statistical unlikelihood that out of all the tens of thousands of wild animal markets in China, the disease first appeared in the one that was a couple of hundred yards from China’s “dangerous animal-virus” lab where they happened to keep bats, the species thought to be the pathway into the human population.
George, you are probably right about the virus, and the lack of other outbreaks supports your conclusions. But there are several tactical reasons, other than rampant stupidity, to put such a lab in a populated area. Most of them have to do with covering the movements and makeup of involved personnel. I am still not convinced we have seen and heard the truth about this virus. Too many officials are still walking around with that ‘deer in the headlights look’ for me to relax yet. I hope the experts get to the bottom of this soon.
This morning it’s being reported that the CDC went to Wuhan on January 8th but wasn’t told about the outbreak because Chinese officials were ordered to keep it a secret.
Yesterday there was an outbreak in an assisted living nursing home in Washington State, with something like 25 patients and 24 staff showing symptoms out of 108 residents and a very large number of staff. The facility is about a mile from the hospital where the cruise ship evacuee just died, and unless the coincidence is due to some mysterious ancient force that only Kolchak could figure out, it’s safe to say that the nursing home outbreak is directly do to sloppy medical procedures by personnel who were working at both sites.
Trump was very upset that the State Department flew American corona patients back home, and now I’d say that bad decision is almost certain to have led directly to this outbreak, and given the advanced age and poor health of the patients, it is almost certain to end in many American deaths.
CDC personnel were flying from Atlanta to Washington State to take charge of the disaster, and they’ve just put 24 first responders under quarantine. Yesterday the Daily Mail had photos of a first responder in a T-shirt, jeans, and a surgical mask loading a corona virus patient into an ambulance. At this point Chinese responders would have but on a full bio-hazard suit before even walking onto the grounds of the nursing home.
This level of casual sloppiness is going to prove disastrous, and it seems to keep recurring.
Oops. The patient who died in Washington State wasn’t one of the evacuees, he was a case of unknown origin.
It’s also just down the road from Bill Gates’ house. Which is odd given he was recently running simulations of a global pandemic.
from the research lab a couple hundred yards away
If I have the right coordinates, it’s more like 30 km away.
Recheck your coordinates. One end is out in a field somewhere. Going from “Wuhan Institute of Virology” to the “Wuhan South China Seafood Market” is 13 km, and pretty much a direct shot over the river.
That’s still a whole lot further than the “few blocks” I’d been reading. I should stop trusting anything written by journalists, or perhaps second-hand reports of what somebody said.
The reaction of the chinese government makes me think the origin was the lab and they know how dangerous it is.
On the other hand, as was pointed out by a caller to the Rush Limbaugh Show, we aren’t hearing much about the protests in Hong Kong these days. I’ll admit this seems like a real exercise in paranoia, but on the other hand, things have calmed considerably there. It would be unwise to think the ChiCom apparatchik haven’t taken note. If not this time, perhaps in the future.
What I’m sure they’ve particularly noticed is that China can handle an outbreak of killer disease, and the rest of the world can’t.
Of particular note: when your medicines or medical equipment are largely imported from China. Continuing this practice as business-as-usual may not be the wisest approach.
By “handle” meaning suppress information?
The coronvirus is not very significant.
In terms of, if consider “global warming” as significant, then this virus outbreak is very significant. Or compared to major Hurricanes, very significant on nations or the entire world.
As analogy the coronvirus {COVID-19} is high stakes gambling.
And China has lost and will loss more in the future. At present the dollar loss is tens of trillions of dollar and rest of world in total lost less than 1 trillion dollars.
But such costs are including vague stuff like opportunity losses and I will grant it’s uncertain and sort of assessing losses in high stake gambling game. Or in 5 years one could measure it better.
And other nations could loses more at to the moment and later losing a lot in the game.
One aspect is China loss might translate in better China “governing” which result in turning any loss into a big gain.
But big losers at this point seem to be China- and Japan and South Korea. And it could have a big effect upon Iran.
“Handle” as in quarantining millions of people and keeping the deaths down to an insignificant number by their standards.
If Trump tried to quarantine LA, a Democrat judge would issue an injunction before the ink was dry on the Executive Order.
The Chinese now know that, if they want to rule the world, all they need do is release a disease that’s as easy to spread as this one, but significantly more deadly.
It’s still too early to tell how widespread this outbreak will be world-wide. The numbers are not encouraging, but WHO hasn’t declared it a pandemic (yet). We seem to be holding to the 2% mortality rate, which seems to be afflicting those with complicating medical conditions more so that others. That figure does make it worse than the flu, if it holds that way in “developed” countries. China is in reality not that far back from “developed” these days. At least in the parts of the country where they are getting their statistics (that they are willing to share) from. So far, in the United States, 2% is accurate albeit with extremely small numbers of afflicted. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Other thing, is this “COVID-19 event” has proven {if this was needed} is that US is the superpower of the world.
And that China is not a superpower.
Of course, China is a big market, as is India.
As is Africa or Europe.
Much like the death of Epstein and spying on the Trump campaign, we will never know the truth about this.
I will give credit to the ChiComs for sharing the genome of this virus and getting it out fairly quickly. Their response this time will make it difficult not to do the same if they ever purposely release an “engineered” virus. Any hesitation to do so should be reasonably interpreted as an admission of guilt.
My assumption now is that this is beyond containment and probably was before we heard about it. As of last week there had only been 400 test performed in this country so it’s all but certain that it has been circulating for some time undetected.
If we quarantine LA, how would you propose to feed them? What about the drivers of the thousands of trucks every day that would take and the thousands of people making deliveries? It’s not like they will stop getting all the other things that keep the hospitals busy now.
We’ll all just have to take our chances and hope it’s no worse than the flu.
The Chinese confront the same reality, their response has been about as efficient as the last 100 years of communist governments should have led us to expect. The real hard to find number will be the number of healthy people that staved to death from their quarantine.
–My assumption now is that this is beyond containment and probably was before we heard about it–
It was beyond containment, before the Chinese locked down Wuhan.
Or 5 million had already left by time it was locked down- and lot of them left in trains {and train routes match the other cities which first got infected}.
What they did might have worked if they had acted faster. I would have stopped the trains, as the first immediate priority. And if not that, at least have every passenger wear a masks. Though insistence that every one wear a mask on the streets was pointless.
–As of last week there had only been 400 test performed in this country so it’s all but certain that it has been circulating for some time undetected.–
It’s possible. But it said about 10% has serious effects, and these serious cases would shown up in medical centers and medical staff would have been infected. And we would know about it. So only way it would make sense is having much lower rate of having serious effects, like 1% or less.
I believe only about 5% of cases from the cruise ship have proven serious, and that’s from a much older demographic. So it may turn out that a much smaller percentage have to be hospitalized in the West than in China.
Yeah, it could be about 1% or less.
But then that lowers the mortality.
The problem from the beginning was the uncertainty.
And only winning plan was to delay the spread until such time as we get more knowledge.
And it could be China didn’t do enough to delay it, but US probably did.
But we still need more time to find out more about it, so we still take all {reasonable} steps to delay it.
And gain the time to develop treatments and the longer time needed for a safe vaccine. Or if rush the vaccine, the vaccine could cause more harm than COVID-19.
It is unrealistic to think any virus can be stopped. Like SARS there is no effective means of quarantine with a virus that is communicable before you show symptoms, which is the case for most “successful” viruses. What is more important is the mortality rate. This strain is not that strong. This season’s flu strain has caused more deaths by a factor of ten than this virus. And no one has even mentioned that fact on any news network. Because that would waste a perfectly good crisis.
You don’t want to look at the total number of deaths but the % of those who died. A lot more people got the flu than corona virus. No one knows how many people died in China.
There are already enough cases outside of China to get that number. It is less than 1%. That population is made up mostly of people with compromised health.