Coronavirus & Lime

[monkey!]

Nacho,

If one ventures outside without having filled out the prerequisite form then, yes - one will be fined and because the French are truculent teenagers the fines looks to be increased because stupid does stupid.

RC, that paper from the Imperial College was based upon the UK’s previously intended response - which was to do nothing - and subsequently Boris Johnson changed policy.

Let’s see how long this thing lasts... and for you Yankee-Doodles without health insurance, you’re fucked and should’ve voted Bernie.

Once again, Thanks, China!

[nacho]

Sanders just tapped out!

[monkey!]

Sanders just tapped out!

People are stupid.

[RottingCorpse]

Maybe it won't be so bad after all.

https://youtu.be/XO6FW1aJkTw

[RottingCorpse]

Check-ins?

Life in small town West Virginia seems to carry on mostly as usual, though I haven't been out of the house in a week. Last time I left, t was certainly quieter than usual. I'll likely go for a run today.

A friend of mine is a nurse at the local hospital and has been doing semi-daily updates. The hospital has restricted all visitation, but they don't seem to be seeing an uptick in admissions.... yet.

[monkey!]

Italy seems to be losing between 400-600 people per day and Spain looks to be catching up with that trend... whilst France has something like 5000 people in intensive care,  or maybe more - whatever. I’m done to only three bottles of wine and I’m not sure my bottle of Bordeaux is at peak drinking age...

Life is tough.

[nacho]

My NYC authors say that one person a day is dying. Here in Bethesda, almost everyone has bugged out. It's a ghost town. DC just announced that restaurants, bars, and businesses will be closed till the end of April. No doubt MD will follow suit.

We supplied up for about two weeks last Tuesday. So... We're just over a week from killing the neighbors!

[monkey!]

Another 800 today in Italy.

[monkey!]

Another 400 in Spain.

[RottingCorpse]

Tenacious little fucker.

Follows the deaths not the cases is advice I read yesterday. (I think it was in a Twitter thread.) testing has been so haphazard that case numbers don’t give an accurate picture. To paraphrase, deaths from this thing are insanely obvious and therefore easier to keep track of. Also, I read a detailed account of what happens when someone dies from it. I’ll see if can dig it up to post but it was fucking awful and basically chased me off the internet for the rest of the day.

[RottingCorpse]

Pics, tweets, and links on the click-through, but this is a pretty good assessment of what we know so far of where this ting may have come from.

tl;dr... Wuhan Wet Markets.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/03/17/covid-19-coronavirus-did-not-come-from-a-lab-study-shows-natural-origins/

No, COVID-19 Coronavirus Was Not Bioengineered. Here’s The Research That Debunks That Idea

Don’t you just love conspiracy theories? Especially when two groups of people have pretty much the same conspiracy theory about each other?

Some folks including politicians in the U.S. and China have both suggested that the COVID-19 coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) that’s causing the pandemic may actually be a bioweapon that was manufactured in a lab. The only difference between their conspiracy theories is who’s being accused of doing the manufacturing.

On the one corner are some people in the U.S. who are hinting or in some cases openly claiming that China put together this virus. For example, look at what Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) tweeted out back on January 30:

Then, Steve Mosher wrote on February 22 an opinion piece for the New York Post entitled, “Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab.” Take a wild guess at what Mosher wrote about in his piece. By the way, Mosher is not a biomedical scientist, but instead is the president of the Population Research Institute and author of book called Bully of Asia: Why China’s ‘Dream’ Is the New Threat to World Order. So chances are that he didn’t love China in the first place. But who knows, love works in mysterious ways.

So what evidence have Cotton, Mosher, and others provided to support these suggestions or claims? Incriminating pictures? Suspicious emails? Some awkward selfies? Any kind of scientific evidence?

Well, as Cotton picked out, there just happens to be a biosafety level-four (BSL-4) laboratory situated in Wuhan, China, the city where the whole outbreak started. Oh, and the lab had housed some types of coronaviruses among other pathogens. Yep, that’s the evidence.

As you probably know, proximity alone should not imply guilt. That would be like claiming that you farted whenever there’s a bad smell and you happen to be in the vicinity. Sure you may have intestines but that doesn’t mean that every foul stench emanated from your guts.

Plus, it’s a lot easier to leak a pocket of air though your butt than a virus from a BSL-4 facility. BSL-4 facilities maintain the highest level of security among bio-laboratories since they do work on dangerous potentially life-threatening agents such as the Ebola, Lassa fever, and Marburg viruses. So it’s not as if the people inside these labs are playing throw and catch with the viruses and stuffing them into their pockets. To be designated as a BSL-4, the lab has to have the appropriate ventilation systems, reinforced walls, security systems, and construction to keep the wrong things inside and the right things outside.

Is it unusual then to have a BSL-4 facility in a city like Wuhan, China? Not really. There are already at least six BSL-4 facilities in the U.S. in Atlanta, GA, Frederick, MD, Galveston, TX, Hamilton, MT, and San Antonio, TX. According to the Federation of American Scientists website, seven others may be planned, under construction, or possibly finished in various cities such as Boston, MA, and Richmond, VA. These labs in the U.S. also study and house a range of dangerous pathogens. So again having a lab that studies bad pathogens does not mean that the lab released anything.

Not to be outdone, some in China have made similar suggestions, except that it’s the U.S. that built the virus and released it in China. Well, that’s original. For example, take a look at these three tweets from Zhao Lijian, Spokesperson and Deputy Director General, Information Department for the Foreign Ministry of China:

Yes, the claim is that the U.S. released a virus in China so that the U.S. can then eventually suffer the consequences of the spreading virus just a couple months later. Makes a whole lotta sense, except that it doesn’t. Where exactly is the real evidence that the U.S. military created SARS-CoV2?

The back-and-forth dialogue has continued with President Donald Trump then referring to SARS-CoV2 as the “Chinese Virus” as can be seen here:

When questioned why he was using this label rather than the real scientific name of the virus, Trump claimed that it was in response to the claim that the U.S. military had created the virus. The video accompanying the following tweet shows the exchange:

Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

So, it looks like conspiracy theorists on both sides haven’t really provided any compelling evidence that SARS-CoV2 was produced in a lab, whether in the U.S., in China, or in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

In fact, there is not only a lack of evidence supporting these conspiracy theories, there has been growing strong scientific evidence against both of them. Scientists, you know the ones who are actually trying to find the truth and solve a problem rather than blame people, have been conducting genetic analyses to determine where the virus came from and how it ended up infecting humans. Although viruses aren’t exactly like people as they don’t seem to have feelings or spread rumors, viruses do have genetic material like people, except their genetic material is not quite as complex as those of humans. Nevertheless, like humans, viruses still pass along such materials when they replicate and evolve. It’s not as simple as The Jerry Springer Show using genetic testing to find out if a guy is someone’s father, but scientists can use more advanced genetic analysis to figure out the origins, the “family tree” of SARS-CoV2.

Indeed, strong clues had already emerged by February 26, 2020, when a Perspectives piece was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the piece, David M. Morens, M.D. and Peter Daszak, Ph.D. from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Jeffery K. Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D. wrote: “Of course, scientists tell us that SARS-CoV-2 did not escape from a jar: RNA sequences closely resemble those of viruses that silently circulate in bats, and epidemiologic information implicates a bat-origin virus infecting unidentified animal species sold in China’s live-animal markets.”

This wasn’t exactly a case of same bat channel, same bat time. But the first, more deadlier SARS virus seemed to cause the 2002-2003 outbreak after it had managed to jump from bats to humans via intermediate hosts such as masked palm civets. Yes, some masked beings may have inadvertently partnered with bats to bring the original SARS virus to humans. So it wouldn’t be too surprising if something like that happened again for SARS-CoV2.

Even more evidence of a natural rather than human-made origin for SARS-CoV2 has emerged from a study described in a research letter just published in Nature Medicine. In the letter, a research team (Kristian G. Andersen from The Scripps Research Institute, Andrew Rambaut from the University of Edinburgh, W. Ian Lipkin from the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, Edward C. Holmes from The University of Sydney and Robert F. Garry from Tulane University) described how they had analyzed the genetic sequences that code for the protein spikes on the surface of SARS-CoV2. The virus looks sort of like a medieval mace with multiple spikes sticking out from its spherical shape. These spikes aren’t just for show as the virus uses them to latch on to a cell that it wants to invade and then push its way into the cell. Very medieval stuff.

Apparently, portions of these spike proteins are so effective in targeting specific receptors on human cells that it is hard to imagine humans manufacturing them, not with known existing technology. The researchers then concluded that this feature and thus the new coronavirus could have in all likelihood only evolved over time naturally. You see humans can make useful stuff like ride-sharing apps but are still quite puny compared to nature when it comes to making stuff like viruses.

In fact, the research team found that the SARS-CoV-2 structure in general is quite different from what humans would have likely concocted. If a human had wanted to create a viral weapon, he or she would have started with the structure of a virus that’s already known to cause illness in people. Naturally, if you want to make a weapon, you may want to start with something like a grenade launcher rather than a smoothie maker, not that the virus looks like either. Instead, the structure of SARS-CoV2 is quite similar to those of viruses known to infect bats and pangolins.

So all of this further supports the theory that the virus jumped from bats to humans via some intermediate animal host. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the virus started causing trouble as soon as it started infecting humans. An alternative possibility is that it jumped a longer time ago and hung out among humans for a while before eventually evolving into its current troublesome selves. This latter possibility would be somewhat analogous to inviting someone to live with you because he or she initially seemed relatively harmless but then over time finding out that this flat mate has become a terror.

The findings from the genetic analyses are consistent with how SARS-CoV2 is currently behaving. The virus is not acting like a bio-weapon right now. The best bio-weapons kill at a much higher rate and can be readily transported and released. Imagine being told that a bio-weapon might take the lives of 1% to 3.4% of the people that it infects but you don’t quite know specifically which ones. The difference between SARS-CoV2 and pathogens like the Ebola Virus or anthrax is like the difference between a bunch of sofas and a collection of missiles. Sure, the former can cause harm but not in a predictable and consistent manner. If someone actually decided to develop SARS-CoV2 as a bio-weapon, that person needs to find a new job.

So there you have it: scientific evidence trumping conspiracy theories. Will all of these scientific findings finally quash the “virus-was-made-in-a-lab-and-it-is-your-fault” rhetoric between the politicians and on social media? Probably not. Since when has science stopped such political rhetoric. Maybe, though, it will get more people to focus on the much more important matter at hand: trying to control this pandemic together.

[Nubbins]

Check-ins?

Atlanta is good, all things considered. We're settled in Marietta, which is Northwest of the city, somewhat. I've been prepping for this for about 4-5 weeks now, so we have a decent stock of stuff.

I decided to start a Pandemic blog (https://matthillica.tumblr.com/), which will either be awesome if this goes on for 12-18 months or seem really stupid if life picks up and is back to normal in 3-4 weeks, but whatever. My bet is that we're quarantined at least until mid June, but even that would be a best case scenario for me. I dunno... just felt like writing some of this stuff down because it made sense as a way to process all of this. It's more of a way for me to go back and process how this all felt once the years pass and the memory of this whole situation has dulled somewhat.

Stores here seem to still be functioning, although when I do take trips to the grocery store, I find myself buying things I wouldn't usually get because they're all that's left. Things like potato bread (this stuff is awesome and I'm not sure why it's the last thing left on the shelf), tomato bisque vs. soup (my wife corrected me that we usually buy soup, not bisque and I clapped back "well, that's all that was left!")... it was a quick spousal argument like many followed by several moments of silence as we each weighed the words "all that was left". Seems like there have been a lot of those this week.

My challenges with this so far have almost all been personal. Taking a conference call over website edits or a marketing status with our team punctuated by frantic texts to my wife at her folks' house begging her not to let them go to the store and to just use the frozen meat we'd put in a cooler and brought to them that day. My wife also has some pretty serious autoimmune diseases (Schmidt's Syndrome... JFK had it), so trying to protect her health and the health of my in laws has taken up most of my mental real estate this week.

Oh, also my wife is 14 weeks pregnant, so our timing is pretty fuckin impeccable there too. Nothing completes the apocalypse scenario like a pregnant, vulnerable wife... just ask Lori Grimes.

Besides all that, I find myself surrounded by people who are at various stages of coming to grips with this. They run the gamut from "omg this is the apocalypse" to "this is just the media trying to bring Trump down"... which basically means I'm trying to keep all people at arms' length. We were out in our driveway the other day just trying to escape the monotony of our house and I guess everyone else in our little neighborhood decided the same thing. As we were out, some other neighbors walked by and asked us how we were doing... idle chit chat. They stood at the top of the driveway. After a bit, the husband spoke up and said something along the lines of "yeah, I decided to work from home yesterday and join everyone else not doing actual work." and shook his head as if this was all being blown out of proportion. The first thought when he did that was, "Man, I hope he doesn't try to come down this driveway and commiserate with us because he's big and I don't want to have to tell him to get away." So many surreal moments like that.

Anyway, hope you are all well and staying as sane as possible. Thank god for weed and video games.

[Sirharles]

We lost 50% of our office on Friday.  Layoffs.  Luckily I survived the first round, but I doubt I'll survive the next.  Probably because the next round will be the business closing.  We are a small accounting firm for restaurants and obviously have been hit hard by many of them closing.  Luckily a few have gone to carryout or delivery only and might eek by the next few months.  If the closures lasts past April I think that will be it for my clients.  I don't have the ability to telecommute.  We have to be hardwired into the network since we deal with business' financial information. 

I'm in a good position compared to others for sure.  We have plenty of food, our neighbors have chickens that lay eggs and grow their own vegetables.  I've also got a wife who has a job unless governments completely cease.  But by that time we will have bunkered down in my father's place in WVA.  We have some money in the bank and if I do lose my job we won't be homeless.  I know a lot of people are much worse off than I am.  All that being said I'm scared.  I'm sure we all are to an extent, but in truth that brings me little comfort.  I'm not sure why I'm writing all this out.  Maybe it's just so I can express the craziness floating around my brain.

[monkey!]

Yet another 600 in Italy.

[nacho]

For me, traditional book sales are dead. No orders in the last two weeks. But an outpouring of support for the ebooks, audiobooks, and direct sales has kept this month in the black (so far). If the community continues to support us in this fashion, we'll be able to get by. The problem is that they have to do this every month (and, if this is the new norm...)

Bethesda is crazy. Everyone who could afford to go is gone. There are now more cops (and national guard) than people. The farmer's market was open yesterday, but armed guards roamed around everywhere. We also hit the supermarket and it was post-hurricane-looted style.

I've kind of passed though the anxiety phase and am now just stealing all the new "Home Premiere" movies, playing video games, and working on the final edits to my sci-fi novel.

The throne maiden is like you, Sirharles. Technically not allowed to work at home since she has to be hardwired into the network. For folks of her ilk, the solution is "80 hours of paid training." That begins this week and buys her two weeks of full pay. After that, the paychecks end. The hope is that we'll either get back to some sense of normality by then or the Feds will do a lockdown and protect the contractors like her in some way OR it'll be the apocalypse and we can stop worrying about fucking money (we both kind of prefer that scenario).