Most of the sick in Canada aren't carrying the virus.

This is bad news, because we're back where we were a few weeks ago, before we thought that we'd identified it as a corona virus. Now, once again, we don't have a good way to diagnose it, or any good hints as to how to deal with it.

I know its a favorite topic of the lunatic fringe, but developments like this keep me wondering if SARS isn't a bioweapon.

It could be, but it looks pretty "standard". I was at a lecture by a biologist years ago who was describing the likely outbreak pattern for a "new" disease coming out of central China.

My concern at the moment is its keeping its doubling rate steady at 2 weeks. That's a million infected in 10 weeks time and 50,000 or so dead. I have no idea what the capacity of the health services are to handle this.

Not to make light of the subject, but...

I can't understand all this press given to what is essentially a particularly nasty form of the common cold. The relevant issues would seem to be focused around China's inability to control this virus, and why they let it affect as much of their population as it has so far.

> essentially a particularly nasty form of the common cold.

I'm not aware that the common cold has a mortality rate of 5%. Influenza does, in its worst forms, and I think we're all forgetting the death toll from the 1918 strain. Very few people have ever really had 'flu - they might think they have, but its actually less common than people think.

Extropolate the 1918 outbreak to the population of the modern world and you'd have a death toll in excess of 100 million world-wide.

That's kind of unlikely, but its worth being very concerned about. I'm certainly not planning to meet with my clients in Taiwan or Singapore for some time.

That is a good point.

I still fail to see why so much press coverage is being given to this outbreak. Granted, I don't mean that we should just up and ignore the problem altogether, but some of the more outrageous accounts liken this to the next Black Plague, or some super-sophisticated bioweapon that can somehow outmutate efforts to find an effective antigen for it.

What if... it's just a normal virus that managed to mutate into something that found an immune weak spot? Again, I'm not trying to belittle the disease itself, but trying to make a point here.

I suspect its just a normal virus. People and animals live in pretty close proximity in Central China - most of our cold and flu virii have made the species jump there, this is probably just another of those.

Sooner or later there will be another 'flu pandemic though, its probably good to have a bit of a wake up call.

Of course, the paranoic inside me might say that this is good for deflecting attention away from the "reconstruction" of Iraq - especially now the Generals "90 days" have "stretched" to 3-6 months.