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They are unseen, unheard, only pop up once every few years to cause mischief, no?
-
IP addresses are NOT logged in this forum so there's no point asking. Please note that this forum is full of homophobes, racists, lunatics, schizophrenics & absolute nut jobs with a smattering of geniuses, Chinese chauvinists, Moderate Muslims and last but not least a couple of "know-it-alls" constantly sprouting their dubious wisdom. If you believe that content generated by unsavory characters might cause you offense PLEASE LEAVE NOW! Sammyboy Admin and Staff are not responsible for your hurt feelings should you choose to read any of the content here. The OTHER forum is HERE so please stop asking.
From 'tiger to wildcat': Coronavirus could die out without vaccine
- Thread starter Leongsam
- Start date
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They are unseen, unheard, only pop up once every few years to cause mischief, no?
Where I am, I see Pritam very frequently, the other good folks do pop up once in a while. What are you talking about?
- Joined
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I see the quiet party as being quiet. N imagine having decades of experience running a town council n leaving themselves open to a pap attack. Even the pro oppies were unable to defend them.
Got lah. I see HSK and CCS frequently too. Esp the latter. Good in cracking jokes. Entertaining too.
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2020
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i never see my mp before
i swear
U can always arrange to see him/her. Every week.
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2020
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does he or she give sure win toto or 4d numbers?
They are MPs. But they can also give 4d if u request for it. Then u go to pray to god of wealth lah
- Joined
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stuff.co.nz
New Zealand will be left behind with 'Covid-hysteria'
Damien Grant05:00, Jun 21 2020FacebookTwitterWhats AppRedditEmailComments117
6-7 minutes
Opinion writing challenges us to consider fresh perspectives. Support healthy debate by making a contribution.
OPINION: The latest series of Covid-19 blunders is a timely reminder that the entire premise of the lockdown was hubris. The bureaucrats went from flattening the curve to believing that they could eliminate the virus and quarantine a population of 5 million people indefinitely from the 7 billion other people on the planet.
They can't. The inevitability of this program's failure, however, does not mean we will abandon it easily. But we will abandon it.
Governments don't walk away from a policy merely because it isn't working. They simply re-double their efforts, imposing more costs and stripping away more freedoms while the populace cheers them on to ever-greater acts of idiocy until we all exhaust ourselves and move on to the next crisis.
For the moment, however, we are at war with a virus and believe that our public officials can keep out a microscopic bug when they can't prevent cocaine from being smuggled in. We've now called in the army to patrol the border; because using soldiers to control a civilian population always works well.
READ MORE:
* Coronavirus: 'Cruel' booze ban in quarantine hotel leaves thirsty guests fuming
* Woman quarantined at Novotel in disbelief after cases were let out
* Coronavirus: Chief Ombudsman to inspect COVID-19 isolation and quarantine facilities
* Jacinda Ardern sends in military after border bungle
Animals and our viral parasites have been battling each other for hundreds of millions of years. Most of the time we co-habitate peacefully, but on occasions the parasites get over-excited and kill their hosts.
Such strains peter out in time. It happens.
With modern techniques we can sometimes isolate particularly virulent outbreaks, such as SARS and Ebola, but once the genie is out of the bottle eradication is almost impossible. AIDS, a difficult condition to catch, still claims over 700,000 people annually.
If we cannot stamp out a virus that requires intimate contact to be transmitted, humanity isn't going to prevent one that can live on the keypad of an eftpos machine for up to 12 hours.
Covid-19 has now spread to every nook and cranny around the globe, with the possible exceptions of North Sentinel and Pitcairn Islands. Herd immunity, whatever you think of it, seems the inevitable outcome in most nations. Certainly, this is what the Americans are in effect pursuing with their lockdowns abandoned in an orgy of protest and looting over the last month.
We are blessed with our 2000 kilometre moat, but in order for this to work we need to lift the drawbridge permanently - and we are not going to do that. The longer our self-imposed isolation continues, the greater the cost and the louder the clamour for abandoning it.
In a typical year New Zealanders took over 3 million overseas trips. We want to travel. We do not want to remain locked inside a large open-air prison indefinitely, no matter how effective the enticements to visit Ohakune and Oamaru are.
At some point our concern for the welfare of Grandma is going to be overtaken by our desire to visit the Grand Canyon.
We are also a trading nation. Ultimately, if we want to sell stuff, we need to visit the people who do the buying, and they need to come here. Locking every visiting businessperson in the Novotel for two weeks is a more effective tariff barrier than anything Muldoon could have dreamed up.
Eventually, isolation means penury. If we cannot trade and travel our economy will become increasingly detached from the rest of the world. Commercial relationships will atrophy. Domestic tourist sites will become abandoned and new facilities will not be constructed. As the rest of the world moves on from Covid-hysteria, we will be left behind.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said he was upset by lapses which saw two Covid-19 cases slip past authorities.
This will not stop us cowering behind our seawalls nor prevent us from hunting down CCTV footage of wayward tourists to see if they visited the toilets at the BP in Taihape. We have invested so heavily and paid such an incredible cost to maintain our purity we will hold on to it at almost any cost. We don't want to admit that it has been a mistake.
But we will give up. Not with a major announcement or a ribbon cutting ceremony, just a quiet cessation of interest. Like Kiwibuild, the national cycleway or Closing the Gaps we will all move on, new dramas will dominate the national psyche and a slow trickle of infections will be managed quietly in doctors' rooms and rest homes.
We have seen how quickly the global focus has moved already, from curve flattening to statue toppling.
We still have a global recession to deal with, a possible war between India and China, the drama of the Trump-Biden election and, of course, Kanye West is overdue for some controversy.
Like our protracted effort to control cannabis, pornography and NZ First, we will persist for far longer than we should, even after it has becomes obvious that the effort has failed.
* Comments are now closed on this article.
* Damien Grant is a regular columnist for Stuff, and an insolvency practitioner and business owner based in Auckland. He writes from a libertarian perspective and is a member of the Taxpayers Union' but not of any political party.
New Zealand will be left behind with 'Covid-hysteria'
Damien Grant05:00, Jun 21 2020FacebookTwitterWhats AppRedditEmailComments117
6-7 minutes
Opinion writing challenges us to consider fresh perspectives. Support healthy debate by making a contribution.
OPINION: The latest series of Covid-19 blunders is a timely reminder that the entire premise of the lockdown was hubris. The bureaucrats went from flattening the curve to believing that they could eliminate the virus and quarantine a population of 5 million people indefinitely from the 7 billion other people on the planet.
They can't. The inevitability of this program's failure, however, does not mean we will abandon it easily. But we will abandon it.
Governments don't walk away from a policy merely because it isn't working. They simply re-double their efforts, imposing more costs and stripping away more freedoms while the populace cheers them on to ever-greater acts of idiocy until we all exhaust ourselves and move on to the next crisis.
For the moment, however, we are at war with a virus and believe that our public officials can keep out a microscopic bug when they can't prevent cocaine from being smuggled in. We've now called in the army to patrol the border; because using soldiers to control a civilian population always works well.
READ MORE:
* Coronavirus: 'Cruel' booze ban in quarantine hotel leaves thirsty guests fuming
* Woman quarantined at Novotel in disbelief after cases were let out
* Coronavirus: Chief Ombudsman to inspect COVID-19 isolation and quarantine facilities
* Jacinda Ardern sends in military after border bungle
Animals and our viral parasites have been battling each other for hundreds of millions of years. Most of the time we co-habitate peacefully, but on occasions the parasites get over-excited and kill their hosts.
Such strains peter out in time. It happens.
With modern techniques we can sometimes isolate particularly virulent outbreaks, such as SARS and Ebola, but once the genie is out of the bottle eradication is almost impossible. AIDS, a difficult condition to catch, still claims over 700,000 people annually.
If we cannot stamp out a virus that requires intimate contact to be transmitted, humanity isn't going to prevent one that can live on the keypad of an eftpos machine for up to 12 hours.
Covid-19 has now spread to every nook and cranny around the globe, with the possible exceptions of North Sentinel and Pitcairn Islands. Herd immunity, whatever you think of it, seems the inevitable outcome in most nations. Certainly, this is what the Americans are in effect pursuing with their lockdowns abandoned in an orgy of protest and looting over the last month.
We are blessed with our 2000 kilometre moat, but in order for this to work we need to lift the drawbridge permanently - and we are not going to do that. The longer our self-imposed isolation continues, the greater the cost and the louder the clamour for abandoning it.
In a typical year New Zealanders took over 3 million overseas trips. We want to travel. We do not want to remain locked inside a large open-air prison indefinitely, no matter how effective the enticements to visit Ohakune and Oamaru are.
At some point our concern for the welfare of Grandma is going to be overtaken by our desire to visit the Grand Canyon.
We are also a trading nation. Ultimately, if we want to sell stuff, we need to visit the people who do the buying, and they need to come here. Locking every visiting businessperson in the Novotel for two weeks is a more effective tariff barrier than anything Muldoon could have dreamed up.
Eventually, isolation means penury. If we cannot trade and travel our economy will become increasingly detached from the rest of the world. Commercial relationships will atrophy. Domestic tourist sites will become abandoned and new facilities will not be constructed. As the rest of the world moves on from Covid-hysteria, we will be left behind.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said he was upset by lapses which saw two Covid-19 cases slip past authorities.
This will not stop us cowering behind our seawalls nor prevent us from hunting down CCTV footage of wayward tourists to see if they visited the toilets at the BP in Taihape. We have invested so heavily and paid such an incredible cost to maintain our purity we will hold on to it at almost any cost. We don't want to admit that it has been a mistake.
But we will give up. Not with a major announcement or a ribbon cutting ceremony, just a quiet cessation of interest. Like Kiwibuild, the national cycleway or Closing the Gaps we will all move on, new dramas will dominate the national psyche and a slow trickle of infections will be managed quietly in doctors' rooms and rest homes.
We have seen how quickly the global focus has moved already, from curve flattening to statue toppling.
We still have a global recession to deal with, a possible war between India and China, the drama of the Trump-Biden election and, of course, Kanye West is overdue for some controversy.
Like our protracted effort to control cannabis, pornography and NZ First, we will persist for far longer than we should, even after it has becomes obvious that the effort has failed.
* Comments are now closed on this article.
* Damien Grant is a regular columnist for Stuff, and an insolvency practitioner and business owner based in Auckland. He writes from a libertarian perspective and is a member of the Taxpayers Union' but not of any political party.
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2010
- Messages
- 12,289
- Points
- 113
Has influenza died out without a vaccine?
Or the common cold?
The Wuhan Coronovirus will become another strain of influenza. Don't let the dramatic actions of world governments in 2020 mislead you into thinking otherwise.
The Spanish Flu become just another strain of flu, possibly a predecessor of the HxNy family. We don't give a flying fuck about HxNy do we? We also don't even need vaccines for HxNy.
30 years later, our grandkids will be using the last rolls of toilet paper we purchased this spring. We will tell them tales of the Great Flu Lockdown
Or the common cold?
The Wuhan Coronovirus will become another strain of influenza. Don't let the dramatic actions of world governments in 2020 mislead you into thinking otherwise.
The Spanish Flu become just another strain of flu, possibly a predecessor of the HxNy family. We don't give a flying fuck about HxNy do we? We also don't even need vaccines for HxNy.
30 years later, our grandkids will be using the last rolls of toilet paper we purchased this spring. We will tell them tales of the Great Flu Lockdown
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2008
- Messages
- 63,680
- Points
- 113
I think the term "die out" is referring to the fact that it will just become another common cold. It is not suggesting that covid-19 will disappear.
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2008
- Messages
- 63,680
- Points
- 113
The COVID-19 coronavirus is changing. What's not clear is what it means
Sharon Kirkey
1 day ago
© Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images A doctor cares for an elderly patient with COVID-19 on June 18, 2020 in Santiago, Chile.
…
When a handful of doctors in northern Italy recently claimed that the virus that causes COVID-19 appears to be losing steam, that it no longer seems to be the same “biological bomb” it was when the pandemic first hit, expert reaction ranged from bewilderment to horror. Some thought something must have been lost in translation.
Then, only days later, Dr. Donald Yealy, chief of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre, a US$21 billion health enterprise that spans 40 hospitals across western and central Pennsylvania, New York State and Maryland, gathered his notes for his latest press briefing. Yealy remarked that, anecdotally, COVID-19 cases seem less severe than a few weeks ago. People aren’t requiring as much intensive care. The proportion needing to be placed on a ventilator to help them breathe has fallen. The total amount of the virus in those who test positive seems “much less” than in the earlier stages of the crisis.
Yealy said he wasn’t attributing the observations “solely or even predominantly” to mutations. “We simply don’t know.” Viral pandemics are dynamic and complicated, he said. They wax and wane. Numerous factors could be at play.
He knows how hungry people are for a glimmer of hopeful news about a virus occupying so many minds. In an interview this week with the National Post, he chose his words carefully. “I am not saying it’s gone away — the message isn’t to declare victory, or say that we have this beaten,” Yealy said.
“But it’s fair to say that the experience with the virus is changing.”
It’s been more than 100 days since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11; 100 days since Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director-general, called on countries to “prepare and ready hospitals.” By then, 4,291 people had lost their lives. One hundred days later, the global death toll is nearing 450,000. Even as cases fall in Canada, no one is ruling out a second wave. Instead, health officials are bracing for the unknown.
While Yealy said people in his regions “don’t seem to have the same level of sickness as a few weeks ago,” several doctors in Canada said they have seen nothing of the kind, that there’s no evidence the virus is losing potency. “In short, no,” said Dr. Alan Drummond, of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.
“In the last 10 days, we still put five patients on extracorporeal life support, the most extreme support that we have for people who are failing mechanical ventilation,” said Ferguson, head of critical care for Toronto’s University Health Network. The youngest patient was 22.
In London, Ont., similar proportions of people are still being admitted to hospital and the ICU. The proportion requiring mechanical ventilation hasn’t changed; it’s still around two-thirds of patients, said Dr. Wael Haddara, chief of critical care medicine at London Health Sciences Centre. “So, there is no indication that the severity has diminished at all.”
In fact, the opposite might be true. Doctors in China reported last month that people in a new cluster of cases in two northeast regions were taking longer to show symptoms, and longer to recover.
This week, scientists at Scripps Research in Florida reported, in a pre-print paper, that a genetic mutation in the virus circulating throughout Europe and the U.S. significantly increases its “infectivity.” The mutation, known as D614G, quadrupled the number of spikes the virus uses to latch onto, break into and infect human cells.
Genome Canada, with $41 million in federal backing, has launched its own massive viral genome-sequencing project. “We ourselves have seen the D614G gene in sequences of our own. So it’s here,” said Dr. Samira Mubareka, a medical microbiologist at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital.
What’s not clear is what any of this means.
“Notions that SARS-CoV-2 will evolve into the Andromeda Strain or become as benign as the common cold prey on our ignorance and fear,” evolutionary biologists wrote in Undark Magazine.
The WHO said last week nothing has changed in terms of severity or transmissibility and that the last thing needed is to suggest the virus has suddenly mutated into something less dangerous. The virus, said the WHO’s emergencies chief Mike Ryan, remains a “killer.”
© AAMIR QURESHI/AFP via Getty Images
SARS-CoV-2 only showed itself to humans roughly seven months ago, and while it is changing, it seems to be mutating at a relatively low rate. “What’s hard to tease out is, when you do see changes — you might see anywhere between half a dozen and a dozen changes in any given virus — is to really understand what the significance is,” said Mubareka, a virologist and infectious diseases doctor.
More than 40,000 genome sequences have been uploaded to publicly available websites. Scientists are scouring the genetic codes, reading through the 30,000 chemical letters, looking for blips and deletions and comparing sequences coming out of other countries, and while there are some subtle changes, none have resulted in differences in the way the virus spreads or the type of disease it causes, the WHO has said.
Yealy has no hard scientific data; “it’s just a general, crude observation” that cases under his care look different, he said. “Perhaps we’re better at treating patients.”
Western and central Pennsylvania are experiencing nowhere near the peak of people with suspected or actual disease. It’s possible physical distancing, face masks and better hygiene are having an effect. It’s possible that the most susceptible were the ones disproportionately attacked in the first wave of the pandemic. The warmer weather and humidity may be playing into this, Yealy added. But viruses can change over time. “This particular virus doesn’t look like it’s changing a lot. But it’s a possibility to think about.”
“There are probably six different factors at play and we won’t understand all of this. This is a virus that no one knew anything about eight months ago.”
Scientists are frantically trying to analyze outbreaks in real time, looking at regions where waves have come and gone. The virus that finally reached us in Canada “would have been passed so many more times in humans than it did at the beginning of the outbreak,” in Wuhan, Mubareka said. “We have a lot of blindspots as far as the genome goes.” Even with the process of sequencing itself, it’s hard to figure out what’s a signal of something of consequence, and what’s just meaningless noise.
When a virus enters a host, it replicates thousands of times. RNA viruses like this one can accumulate small, random mutations, because the molecular machinery it uses to copy itself sometimes gets sloppy. “It makes errors, and sometimes if those errors benefit the virus they’ll be selected for — they’ll persist and get passed on and on because there is some kind of fitness advantage,” Mubareka said.
But sometimes less lethal versions emerge. After sampling nasal swab samples from 382 COVID-positive people, Arizona State University researchers found a single sample that was missing a chunk of it’s genome, 81 of the letters gone. The deletion uncannily mirrors a mutation that arose in the SARS outbreak in 2003 that scientists believe caused much less severe disease later in the outbreak.
Still, “we have to make sure that whatever statements we make are backed up by good, hard science, so it’s reproducible,” said Dalhousie University immunologist David Kelvin. That means testing isolates of the virus in the lab, in cells and animals, before anyone can really say, yes, this means something.
“Because the downside is really bad if you mislead the public to think that the virus is no longer as potent as it once was. People will of course relax their vigilance and succumb to a disease they probably could have avoided,” Kelvin said.
Governments have also expanded testing to include people with more mild disease or no symptoms at all. And if we’re testing people with less severe disease, “well, sure, it will look like (the virus) is becoming less severe,” Mubareka said.
The amount of virus on a swab also isn’t a measure of potency, added Arinjay Banerjee, of McMaster University’s Institute of Infectious Diseases. Sampling time is critical. How much virus is scooped up on a nose swab depends on when in the course of the infection it was taken.
Still, an ideal pathogen, a clever virus, learns to co-exist with its host, Banerjee said, “because if a host dies, if the individual dies, the virus dies with it.” A virus has to be able to leap from the infected to the uninfected, spreading its progeny to the next victim, to sustain the virus population.
“I’ll just be honest and upfront: We don’t know. We just don’t know if it’s weakening,” Banerjee said.
Some coronavirus scientists have speculated that perhaps centuries ago there could have been an outbreak like this with coronaviruses that today are seasonal bugs.
“We don’t have data on this; we haven’t tested this,” Banerjee said. “But who knows, maybe the coronaviruses that cause mild cold-like symptoms could have been lethal in human populations many, many years ago. The virus and the host learned to co-adapt.”
Italy has suffered some of the world’s worst COVID-19 death tolls, but fewer people are being admitted to hospital compared to three months ago, and in some regions, “even the patients that are admitted, especially in emergency, are less severe,” said Dr. Matteo Bassetti, director of an infectious disease clinic at San Martino Hospital in Genoa.
“They have fever, some respiratory symptoms. They have cough. But even in similar ages, they don’t have the same aggressive picture they had three months ago.”
“I am not suggesting not to use the masks, or not to wash the hands or not stay one metre (in Canada, the official advice is two metres) away from the other,” Bassetti said.
“I am just giving the clinical impression, and the clinical impression is the disease is different. I am more optimistic than I was three months ago.”
• Email: [email protected] Twitter: sharon_kirkey
Sharon Kirkey
1 day ago
© Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images A doctor cares for an elderly patient with COVID-19 on June 18, 2020 in Santiago, Chile.
…
When a handful of doctors in northern Italy recently claimed that the virus that causes COVID-19 appears to be losing steam, that it no longer seems to be the same “biological bomb” it was when the pandemic first hit, expert reaction ranged from bewilderment to horror. Some thought something must have been lost in translation.
Then, only days later, Dr. Donald Yealy, chief of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre, a US$21 billion health enterprise that spans 40 hospitals across western and central Pennsylvania, New York State and Maryland, gathered his notes for his latest press briefing. Yealy remarked that, anecdotally, COVID-19 cases seem less severe than a few weeks ago. People aren’t requiring as much intensive care. The proportion needing to be placed on a ventilator to help them breathe has fallen. The total amount of the virus in those who test positive seems “much less” than in the earlier stages of the crisis.
Yealy said he wasn’t attributing the observations “solely or even predominantly” to mutations. “We simply don’t know.” Viral pandemics are dynamic and complicated, he said. They wax and wane. Numerous factors could be at play.
He knows how hungry people are for a glimmer of hopeful news about a virus occupying so many minds. In an interview this week with the National Post, he chose his words carefully. “I am not saying it’s gone away — the message isn’t to declare victory, or say that we have this beaten,” Yealy said.
“But it’s fair to say that the experience with the virus is changing.”
It’s been more than 100 days since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11; 100 days since Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director-general, called on countries to “prepare and ready hospitals.” By then, 4,291 people had lost their lives. One hundred days later, the global death toll is nearing 450,000. Even as cases fall in Canada, no one is ruling out a second wave. Instead, health officials are bracing for the unknown.
While Yealy said people in his regions “don’t seem to have the same level of sickness as a few weeks ago,” several doctors in Canada said they have seen nothing of the kind, that there’s no evidence the virus is losing potency. “In short, no,” said Dr. Alan Drummond, of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.
- WHO moves to update COVID-19 guidance after 'great news' in drug study
- Children don't need to wear masks or follow strict social distancing when they go to school: SickKids expert
- Why does COVID-19 kill some and spare others?
“In the last 10 days, we still put five patients on extracorporeal life support, the most extreme support that we have for people who are failing mechanical ventilation,” said Ferguson, head of critical care for Toronto’s University Health Network. The youngest patient was 22.
In London, Ont., similar proportions of people are still being admitted to hospital and the ICU. The proportion requiring mechanical ventilation hasn’t changed; it’s still around two-thirds of patients, said Dr. Wael Haddara, chief of critical care medicine at London Health Sciences Centre. “So, there is no indication that the severity has diminished at all.”
In fact, the opposite might be true. Doctors in China reported last month that people in a new cluster of cases in two northeast regions were taking longer to show symptoms, and longer to recover.
This week, scientists at Scripps Research in Florida reported, in a pre-print paper, that a genetic mutation in the virus circulating throughout Europe and the U.S. significantly increases its “infectivity.” The mutation, known as D614G, quadrupled the number of spikes the virus uses to latch onto, break into and infect human cells.
Genome Canada, with $41 million in federal backing, has launched its own massive viral genome-sequencing project. “We ourselves have seen the D614G gene in sequences of our own. So it’s here,” said Dr. Samira Mubareka, a medical microbiologist at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital.
What’s not clear is what any of this means.
“Notions that SARS-CoV-2 will evolve into the Andromeda Strain or become as benign as the common cold prey on our ignorance and fear,” evolutionary biologists wrote in Undark Magazine.
The WHO said last week nothing has changed in terms of severity or transmissibility and that the last thing needed is to suggest the virus has suddenly mutated into something less dangerous. The virus, said the WHO’s emergencies chief Mike Ryan, remains a “killer.”
© AAMIR QURESHI/AFP via Getty Images
SARS-CoV-2 only showed itself to humans roughly seven months ago, and while it is changing, it seems to be mutating at a relatively low rate. “What’s hard to tease out is, when you do see changes — you might see anywhere between half a dozen and a dozen changes in any given virus — is to really understand what the significance is,” said Mubareka, a virologist and infectious diseases doctor.
More than 40,000 genome sequences have been uploaded to publicly available websites. Scientists are scouring the genetic codes, reading through the 30,000 chemical letters, looking for blips and deletions and comparing sequences coming out of other countries, and while there are some subtle changes, none have resulted in differences in the way the virus spreads or the type of disease it causes, the WHO has said.
Yealy has no hard scientific data; “it’s just a general, crude observation” that cases under his care look different, he said. “Perhaps we’re better at treating patients.”
Western and central Pennsylvania are experiencing nowhere near the peak of people with suspected or actual disease. It’s possible physical distancing, face masks and better hygiene are having an effect. It’s possible that the most susceptible were the ones disproportionately attacked in the first wave of the pandemic. The warmer weather and humidity may be playing into this, Yealy added. But viruses can change over time. “This particular virus doesn’t look like it’s changing a lot. But it’s a possibility to think about.”
“There are probably six different factors at play and we won’t understand all of this. This is a virus that no one knew anything about eight months ago.”
Scientists are frantically trying to analyze outbreaks in real time, looking at regions where waves have come and gone. The virus that finally reached us in Canada “would have been passed so many more times in humans than it did at the beginning of the outbreak,” in Wuhan, Mubareka said. “We have a lot of blindspots as far as the genome goes.” Even with the process of sequencing itself, it’s hard to figure out what’s a signal of something of consequence, and what’s just meaningless noise.
When a virus enters a host, it replicates thousands of times. RNA viruses like this one can accumulate small, random mutations, because the molecular machinery it uses to copy itself sometimes gets sloppy. “It makes errors, and sometimes if those errors benefit the virus they’ll be selected for — they’ll persist and get passed on and on because there is some kind of fitness advantage,” Mubareka said.
But sometimes less lethal versions emerge. After sampling nasal swab samples from 382 COVID-positive people, Arizona State University researchers found a single sample that was missing a chunk of it’s genome, 81 of the letters gone. The deletion uncannily mirrors a mutation that arose in the SARS outbreak in 2003 that scientists believe caused much less severe disease later in the outbreak.
Still, “we have to make sure that whatever statements we make are backed up by good, hard science, so it’s reproducible,” said Dalhousie University immunologist David Kelvin. That means testing isolates of the virus in the lab, in cells and animals, before anyone can really say, yes, this means something.
“Because the downside is really bad if you mislead the public to think that the virus is no longer as potent as it once was. People will of course relax their vigilance and succumb to a disease they probably could have avoided,” Kelvin said.
Governments have also expanded testing to include people with more mild disease or no symptoms at all. And if we’re testing people with less severe disease, “well, sure, it will look like (the virus) is becoming less severe,” Mubareka said.
The amount of virus on a swab also isn’t a measure of potency, added Arinjay Banerjee, of McMaster University’s Institute of Infectious Diseases. Sampling time is critical. How much virus is scooped up on a nose swab depends on when in the course of the infection it was taken.
Still, an ideal pathogen, a clever virus, learns to co-exist with its host, Banerjee said, “because if a host dies, if the individual dies, the virus dies with it.” A virus has to be able to leap from the infected to the uninfected, spreading its progeny to the next victim, to sustain the virus population.
“I’ll just be honest and upfront: We don’t know. We just don’t know if it’s weakening,” Banerjee said.
Some coronavirus scientists have speculated that perhaps centuries ago there could have been an outbreak like this with coronaviruses that today are seasonal bugs.
“We don’t have data on this; we haven’t tested this,” Banerjee said. “But who knows, maybe the coronaviruses that cause mild cold-like symptoms could have been lethal in human populations many, many years ago. The virus and the host learned to co-adapt.”
Italy has suffered some of the world’s worst COVID-19 death tolls, but fewer people are being admitted to hospital compared to three months ago, and in some regions, “even the patients that are admitted, especially in emergency, are less severe,” said Dr. Matteo Bassetti, director of an infectious disease clinic at San Martino Hospital in Genoa.
“They have fever, some respiratory symptoms. They have cough. But even in similar ages, they don’t have the same aggressive picture they had three months ago.”
“I am not suggesting not to use the masks, or not to wash the hands or not stay one metre (in Canada, the official advice is two metres) away from the other,” Bassetti said.
“I am just giving the clinical impression, and the clinical impression is the disease is different. I am more optimistic than I was three months ago.”
• Email: [email protected] Twitter: sharon_kirkey
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If you are over 50, the onus is on you to exercise and maintain fitness. I've seen those of over 50 with the health of a young man. I've also seen those who succumbed to the most trivial of diseases.
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KNN my uncle think the infectious disease specialist talk only no use KNN they should talk then proceed to get infected infront of the news crew KNN eg my uncle say if cpfb extend beyond the draw down age to >70 yo he will call spf that he is going down cpfb with chopper KNN
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Pray to PAP MP can void parking summon, waive electric bills late payment etc. Chinese deities cannot fight lah.
Pray to PAP MP can void parking summon, waive electric bills late payment etc. Chinese deities cannot fight lah.
But those are peanuts compare to thousands or millions they could win from their God of wealth.
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A bird in hand worth two in bush. Sinkies are suckers for certainty and the now.But those are peanuts compare to thousands or millions they could win from their God of wealth.
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Covid is the perfect virus,2 percent mortality rate,plus a infectious rate of 4.0,and a incubation period of 3 weeks....plus highly infectious even during early stages before symptoms develop.
Now if u can weaponise it and increase the mortality rate to 5%......
Now if u can weaponise it and increase the mortality rate to 5%......
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