LinvilleGorge

Gonna lock this thread for a bit. When it reopens, can y'all please knock off the political sniping? Consider this the Huddle equivalent of a stay at home mandate with mandatory political social distancing to follow or we'll be forced to go back to the stay at home mandate again.

We've tried to stay pretty hands off in this one, but yeah it's starting to get a little ridiculous. Let's try to redirect the conversation back toward the pandemic and away from purely political issues. I realize they're heavily entwined, but the thread is getting pretty derailed at this point and we'd like to keep it here in the main forum.

That's the biggest thing we have to move past as Americans in politics IMO. Stop the doubling down because you supported someone or voted for someone. Once they're in office, it's time to hold them accountable, period. Whether you voted for them or not. I see way too many people who would rather play the "whataboutism" game than hold their chosen politicians responsible for anything.

Yep, I could buy my house in my hometown of NC all day long for $200k at most and that's with my NC town having boomed in recent years. A few years ago, $150k would've bought it.

Median household income in $78.5k. My wife and I make (well, made) well over that and paid well under the current median value years ago. I have no idea how a lot of people are making this work. If I had to guess, a lot of my neighbors are absolutely awash in debt. Lots of single income households up here with three quarter million dollar homes, two $60K+ vehicles in the driveway, and two kids in private school.

American politics in a nutshell

Median home value in my CO town is $612k.

This isn't a black and white either/or issue. There's plenty of blame to go around and Trump and China both certainly deserve a lot.

If it wasn't for Utah's fuged up politics, I'd probably live there instead of CO. With that said, without the fuged up politics, Utah's cost of living would be just as high as CO's.

A leak is definitely possible. A leak does not preclude natural origins. That's what the experts are pretty damn certain about - the virus isn't bioengineered.

It has been independently sequenced numerous times by numerous countries. How do you think we know that the NY outbreak primarily sources to European origin?

No, it's not. The entire genome has been sequenced. They're very confident that it's of natural origin.

Experts are very confident it's not a biological weapon. They're very confident it's a naturally evolved virus. They aren't certain that it didn't escape from a lab. There's a lab in Wuhan only a few miles away from that wet market that focuses on virus collection, sampling, and studying and there are some red flags about just how quickly the Chinese were to blame the wet market when there have been no shortage of concerns from virologists around the globe about those very wet markets.

I've submitted a request to be a part of an antibodies testing study. I think there's a good chance I've had it. I traveled a ton for work in Q1 and developed a nasty lingering intermittent chest cold shortly after a trip to the greater Seattle area in mid-January. It was just odd that there were no head/sinus symptoms. Basically just a general drag ass feeling, mild fever, and a hellish dry cough that lingered for fuging ever. Every time I thought I was getting over it another wave of it would hit. That lasted a good 5-6 weeks. The dry cough was a solid two months. My wife dealt with the same thing. Our four year old daughter was never impacted by it in the least but she surely had to have contracted whatever it was that we had.

Even if it is substantially higher than 2% in China, that 27M figure was assuming literally ever last person in China was infected which certainly is nowhere near the case. Let's say 20% of the Hubei Province became infected and they experienced a 10% mortality rate. That adds up to roughly 1.2M. Then lets say 5% of the rest of China became infected (which I think is highly unlikely given China's lockdown of the Hubei Province) and they experienced a 5% mortality rate as their medical facilities weren't overrun. That adds up to another 3.2M. That's a total of 4.4M. I have no problem assuming China's actual numbers are several, perhaps even many magnitudes greater than they're reporting. I think several magnitudes higher is highly likely. But tens of millions? Nope, not even coming close to buying that. 100k dead in the Hubei Province though? Honestly, that wouldn't terribly shock me.

Just do the math. Even if everyone in China contracted the virus and we figure an overall 2% mortality rate of the infected (not confirmed infected, but overall infected), that's 27M dead. The virus just isn't lethal enough to kill tens of millions in China.

Not even China can cover up tens of millions of deaths. We'll never get a real number out of them and I suspect the real number is significantly higher than the reported number, likely by several magnitudes but several 10s of millions? Nah, not a chance.

Those viruses weren't very biologically successful and vaccine development is very costly, both in monetary terms and resources. The outbreaks didn't last long enough for the early vaccine efforts to come to fruition.

No armchair MD'ing here. This stuff is way out of my wheelhouse. I'm simply passing along info from a personal friend who just so happens to be one of the nation's leading experts on this stuff.

Where are the massive outbreaks? Those viruses aren't very biologically successful.

I really don't know why you're going on the attack. I'm simply trying to share information that is being shared to me by someone who is literally one of the nation's leading experts on public health risk assessment, biodefense, and emerging infectious diseases. I get it, you're a front line medical professional. That's cool. Much respect. That's not what she does. This poo that we're living right now is what she does.

Here's another read if you'd like, but I have to presume you probably already know more than the Director in Chemical Biology Therapeutics at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/15/coronavirus-vaccine-prospects Rushing the process is going to take a vast amount of effort, and some of the steps are going to have to be done on a scale never before attempted. “But that’s next year!” will be the reaction of many who are hoping for a vaccine ASAP, and I can understand why. The thing is, that would be absolutely unprecedented speed, way past the current record set by the Ebola vaccine, which took about five years. It is a tightrope, folks, and we’re going to be trying to run across it. Watch closely; with any luck we will never see anything quite like this again.

Okay, you know more than the editors at Nature journal and former CDC and current Johns Hopkins PhD professionals whose lives revolve around this very stuff. Congrats.

Don't take it from me and my very informed first hand source... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 As of 8 April 2020, the global COVID-19 vaccine R&D landscape includes 115 vaccine candidates (Fig. 1), of which 78 are confirmed as active and 37 are unconfirmed (development status cannot be determined from publicly available or proprietary information sources). Of the 78 confirmed active projects, 73 are currently at exploratory or preclinical stages. The global vaccine R&D effort in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in terms of scale and speed.

Tests in terms of treatment options? Sure, they're trying to re-purpose existing drugs. In terms of vaccine research? I seriously doubt we'll live long enough to ever see anything like this again.