Bharat Rakshak

vishvak wrote:More alarming is how a cure isn't yet made available, or discovered first. No clue about exact max time forward for virus to come out of dormant state. Not to mention exact place of origin or leak. Not all this is clear yet security is not max at places around the world. The most striking aspect here is how Chinese can flaunt bio weapons and get away with accident.

John wrote:

Arun.prabhu wrote:Well, maybe it’s not the end of the world after all...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0

2019-nCoV is responding to chloroquine in the lab. The anti-malaria drug is mass produced and available in enough quantities that we can shut this thing down. So, best or middling case is most likely at this point. If this works as advertised, the worst case i outlined is now pretty much eliminated.

FYI this news was tweeted multiple times from shady sources, China and Pharma company Gilead have cautioned this is preliminary and against false statements that this can stop the virus before more testing.

Also news broke that a cure has been developed by Chinese media by Reuters. This caused the futures to spike (Dow 30k here we come), Chinese media deny and WHO had to come forward there is no such thing and this is fake. Looks like big institutions and hedge funds in US are spreading fake news trying to push the markets higher so they can short it for 2x profit. Expect this to happen over next months as big money tries to cash in on market volatility. Wow pushing fake news to create false hope and misery so you can make $$ greed knows no limits.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/05/coronav ... dates.html

Stock futures turned higher in overnight trading after Reuters said a Chinese TV media outlet had reported that a research team at Zhejiang University had found an effective drug to treat people with the new coronavirus. The news agency, citing traders, suggested this was a reason for the move higher in stocks.

7:50 pm: WHO spokesperson reportedly says there are ‘no known’ effective drug treatments against coronavirus

H5N8: Saudi Arabia reports outbreak of HIGHLY pathogenic bird flu virus

Earlier on Tuesday, a similar alarming report about a bird flu outbreak came from Vietnam, where another highly pathogenic virus strain — H5N6 — led to the deaths of 2,200 birds in a village in the country’s north.
On February 1, China, which has already been gripped with a novel coronavirus originated from the city of Wuhan, reported that an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus was detected in its central Hunan province.
While it hasn’t occupied the news spotlight lately, H5N1 is said to be an even deadlier virus to those who contract it. Nearly 60 percent of H5N1 patients die after contracting the sickness, compared to two percent of Wuhan coronavirus (2019 nCoV) patients thus far.

Arun.prabhu wrote:Did I make any reference Remdesivir? It’s a new drug with limited stock. I was referring to chloroquine, which is cheap, there is a large stock today - because malaria - and the doses tested in the lab are attainable in our bodies with a 500mg tab.

John wrote: FYI this news was tweeted multiple times from shady sources, China and Pharma company Gilead have cautioned this is preliminary and against false statements that this can stop the virus before more testing.

Also news broke that a cure has been developed by Chinese media by Reuters. This caused the futures to spike (Dow 30k here we come), Chinese media deny and WHO had to come forward there is no such thing and this is fake. Looks like big institutions and hedge funds in US are spreading fake news trying to push the markets higher so they can short it for 2x profit. Expect this to happen over next months as big money tries to cash in on market volatility. Wow pushing fake news to create false hope and misery so you can make $$ greed knows no limits.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/05/coronav ... dates.html

An estimated five million people left the city before the lockdown began, prompting anger and criticism of the government's late quarantine of the city.[34][35]

John wrote:

Arun.prabhu wrote:Did I make any reference Remdesivir? It’s a new drug with limited stock. I was referring to chloroquine, which is cheap, there is a large stock today - because malaria - and the doses tested in the lab are attainable in our bodies with a 500mg tab.

I know I was just noting a lot of it’s been cured news popped up in media almost as concentrated effort to prop up the markets and WHO had to come out and had to deny them.

Just saw some financial strategist come out in CNBC claiming we have reached peak and everything should be good. When did financial analysts become experts in Coronavirus?

UlanBatori wrote:Joy! From Wikipedia:

An estimated five million people left the city before the lockdown began, prompting anger and criticism of the government's late quarantine of the city.[34][35]

Many of those barred houses may be of people who left. To hinder thieves. And so... there are 5 million potential CV-carriers all over cheen and some other nations. Elite of Wuhan city might have caught international flights early in the game with the New Year holiday coming up and all.
Given this, the concentration of the virus inside Wuhan says that it is a pretty localized thing. Maybe there is an active SOURCE there still? Or was, for a long period?

Arun.prabhu wrote:Epidemiologists in Hong Kong believe peak will be in late April or early May. The official daily infected count increase delta is just now starting To take off and they think we have reached peak. Peak, my ass!

John wrote: I know I was just noting a lot of it’s been cured news popped up in media almost as concentrated effort to prop up the markets and WHO had to come out and had to deny them.

Just saw some financial strategist come out in CNBC claiming we have reached peak and everything should be good. When did financial analysts become experts in Coronavirus?

Arun.prabhu wrote:To strike fear in our hearts...

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3871594

Those numbers would lead to people dying on the streets...

Some of us, including myself, would secretly love to be in China’s Wuhan right now, experiencing a real-life, post-apocalyptic movie set. The city’s empty streets provide the image of a non-consumerist world at ease with itself.
Coronavirus is all over the news, and I don’t pretend to be a medical specialist, but there is a question I’d like to raise: Where do facts end and where does ideology begin? The first obvious enigma: There are far worse epidemics taking place, so why is there such an obsession with this one when thousands die daily from other infectious diseases?
Of course, an extreme case was the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic, known as Spanish flu, when the death toll is estimated to have been at least 50 million. Around this time, influenza has infected 15 million Americans: at least 140,000 people have been hospitalized and more than 8,200 people killed this season alone. It seems racist paranoia is obviously at work here – remember all the fantasies about the Chinese women in Wuhan skinning live snakes and slurping bat soup. Whereas, in reality, a big Chinese city is probably one of the safest places in the world.
But there is a deeper paradox at work: The more our world is connected, the more a local disaster can trigger global fear and eventually a catastrophe. In the spring of 2010, a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland brought to a standstill air traffic over most of Europe – a reminder of how, regardless of all its ability to transform nature, humankind remains just another living species on the planet Earth.
The catastrophic socio-economic impact of such a minor event is due to our technological development (air travel). A century ago, such an eruption would have passed unnoticed. Technological development makes us more independent from nature and at the same time, at a different level, more dependent on nature’s whims. And the same holds for the spread of coronavirus – if it happened before Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, we probably wouldn’t have even heard about it.

Taking up cudgels
So how are we to fight the virus when it just multiplies as a weird invisible form of parasitic life and its precise mechanism remains basically unknown? It is this lack of knowledge which causes panic. What if the virus mutates in an unpredictable way and triggers a true global catastrophe?
This is my private paranoia: Is the reason why the authorities are displaying panic because they know (or suspect, at least) something about possible mutations that they don’t want to render public in order to avoid public confusion and unrest? Because the actual effects, up to now, have been now relatively modest. One thing is sure: Isolation, and further quarantines, will not do the job.

Full unconditional solidarity and a globally coordinated response is needed, a new form of what was once called communism. If we don’t orient our efforts in this direction, then Wuhan today is maybe the image of the city of our future.
Many dystopias already imagined a similar fate. We mostly stay at home, work on our computers, communicate through videoconferences, work out on a machine in the corner of our home office, occasionally masturbate in front of a screen displaying hardcore sex, and get food by delivery.

Holiday in Wuhan
There is, however, an unexpected emancipatory prospect hidden in this nightmarish vision. I must admit that during the last few days, I have found myself dreaming of visiting Wuhan.
Do half-abandoned streets in a megalopolis – the usually bustling urban centers looking like a ghost town, stores with open doors and no customers, just a lone walker or car here and there, individuals with white masks – not provide the image of a non-consumerist world at ease with itself?
The melancholic beauty of the empty avenues of Shanghai or Hong Kong remind me of some old post-apocalyptic movies like ‘On the Beach,’ which show a city with most of the population wiped out – no big spectacular destruction, just the world out there no longer ready-at-hand, awaiting us, looking at us and for us.
Even the white masks worn by the few people walking around provide a welcome anonymity and liberation from social pressure for recognition.
Many of us remember the famous conclusion of the students’ situationist manifesto from 1966: “Vivre sans temps mort, jouir sans entraves” – to live without dead time, to enjoy without obstacles.
If Freud and Lacan taught us anything, it is that this formula – the supreme case of a superego injunction since, as Lacan aptly demonstrated, superego is at its most basic a positive injunction to enjoy, not a negative act of prohibiting something – is a recipe for disaster. The urge to fill in every moment of the time allotted to us with intense engagement unavoidably ends up in a suffocating monotony.
Dead time – moments of withdrawal, of what old mystics called Gelassenheit, releasement – are crucial for the revitalization of our life experience. And, perhaps, one can hope that an unintended consequence of the coronavirus quarantines in Chinese cities will be that some people at least will use their dead time to be released from hectic activity and think about the (non)sense of their predicament.
I am fully aware of the danger I am courting in making public these thoughts of mine – am I not engaging in a new version of attributing to the suffering of victims some deeper authentic insight from my safe external position and thus cynically legitimizing their suffering?

Racist undertones
When a masked citizen of Wuhan walks around searching for medicine or food, there are definitely no anti-consumerist thoughts on his or her mind – just panic, anger and fear. My plea is just that even horrible events can have unpredictable positive consequences.
Carlo Ginzburg proposed the notion that being ashamed of one’s country, not love of it, may be the true mark of belonging to it.
Maybe some Israelis will gather the courage to feel shame apropos Netanyahu and Trump politics done on their behalf – not, of course, in the sense of shame of being Jewish. On the contrary, feeling shame for what actions in the West Bank are doing to the most precious legacy of Judaism itself.
Perhaps some Brits should also be honest enough to feel shame about the ideological dream that brought them Brexit. But for the people of Wuhan, it’s not the time to feel ashamed and stigmatized but the time to gather courage and patiently persist in their struggle.
If there were people in China who attempted to downplay epidemics, they should be ashamed just as those Soviet functionaries around Chernobyl who publicly claimed there was no danger while immediately evacuating their own families should. Or as those top managers who publicly deny global warming but are already buying houses in New Zealand or building survival bunkers in the Rocky Mountains should.

Maybe the public outrage against such alleged double behavior (which is already compelling the authorities to promise transparency) will give birth to another unintended positive political development in China.
But those who should be truly ashamed are all of us around the world thinking just about how to quarantine the Chinese.

UlanBatori wrote: Calvinji, South American diet is very heavily meat-based, and they eat practically all species. I think the answer is that zillions of virus strains come out and bite ppl in the Amazon regions and Andes and the Pampas every year. Thousands of people die of infection. But CNN/WaPo aren't there to hype it.
Gotta have some empathy for the cheen in this, as much as I may take pleasure in poking them on other things.
They have high density of population in urban PRC, and their people are hard-working and productive, so they are missed if they lose days due to illness. This is why they react fast to these things - and the Usual Quarters go to town sneering at them.

The virus has spread overseas, with 25 nations confirming a total of 191 cases, although there has so far been only one death, in the Philippines.

As of 8 May 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) and respective governments reported a total of 28,646 suspected cases and 11,323 deaths[23] (39.5%), though the WHO believes that this substantially understates the magnitude of the outbreak.[24][25]

About 2,000 people have died of West Nile virus in the United States since it was first detected in New York City in 1999.Jun 10, 2019

LIVERMORE, Calif. (KGO) -- Deep inside the heavily protected Lawrence Livermore Lab complex scientists are trying to build a 3D model of the proteins that make up the structure of the coronovirus.

They hope doing that will provide researchers with a starting point for finding out what makes the virus tick and how to fight it.

Today, the Lab showed us the model they've come up with, colored in vivid red, green and blue. Part DNA double helix, part abstract sculpture.

"The new Coronavirus is not very well understood yet. The structure of the key protein we want to target is not yet known" says Daniel Faissol, part of the research team at Lawrence Livermore.

Thankfully, the team didn't have to start from scratch. The new Coronavirus' protein structure is a close cousin of the SARS virus that killed close to 800 people in the early 2000's. The structure of SARS is well known, so they're using that as a starting point.

They know it's not identical and refinements will have to be made. They're making those refinements using the Lab's own Sierra Supercomputer, the second most powerful in the world - capable of doing more calculations in 1 second than a human could do in 31 billion years.

UlanBatori wrote:Ebola cases & deaths: Wiki Post:

As of 8 May 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) and respective governments reported a total of 28,646 suspected cases and 11,323 deaths[23] (39.5%), though the WHO believes that this substantially understates the magnitude of the outbreak.[24][25]

3 Americans died, incl US citjen living in Liberia.
50% death rate does get the attention. But here it is 2% or less.
For Americans, the West Nile was worse:

About 2,000 people have died of West Nile virus in the United States since it was first detected in New York City in 1999.Jun 10, 2019

So again, note that no blanket quarantine was imposed on Yoo Ess despite 2000 deaths.

UlanBatori wrote:Mr. John: I assume that the word "trolling" refers to when I hold a mirror to the blatant bias of your posts.
Yes, malaria kills (i have no checked how many). The flu kills 12000 to 61000 per year. The West killed 2000 in 2 years. None of these have been used as rationalizations to impose boycotts flight quarantines etc.
So I ask why do it when there is some passing bout that kills 300, or even 600 - just because it is in China or India.
This is blatant racist bias. You may not be able to see that, because the bias agrees with your views. Racists are usually blind their own racism, that is not surprising. Thanks.

BRF has an "ignore" feature. Please use it to avoid having your unquestionable brilliance polluted by my ignorant posts.
You want to state your points, do it. Try not to step on your own mijjile again please with your accusations of "trolling" whatever that is and your whining to admins to have me banned for disrupting your "flow".

UlanBatori wrote:Maybe you would like to put me in quarantine so that I don't pollute the purity of your convictions with questions, Massa?

UlanBatori wrote:Maybe you would like to put me in quarantine so that I don't pollute the purity of your convictions with questions, Massa?
Viruses no doubt are things that only travel on jet planes? Didn't exist before, say, 1990? How many virus attacks killed millions in the decades before that I wonder. Or is it permitted to wonder, instead of blindly following CNN?

House members pressed the briefers on what the government was doing to contain the outbreak, asking whether additional funding was needed.
The Department of Health and Human Services has notified lawmakers that it may need to transfer up to $136 million to help support the response, but it remains unclear how the money will be used and where the money would be transferred from.
“It raised all kinds of questions,” said Representative Nita M. Lowey, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee. “But from the people who briefed us, I think they’re on it, and I look forward to additional information.”
Other lawmakers sounded more skeptical.
“Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said on Twitter after leaving the briefing. “Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.”

His days are long, 12 hours crisscrossing the city and ferrying local residents to buy groceries, get medicine and go to the hospital. And the roads he travels are mostly empty with the city sealed off, public transportation shut down and private vehicles mostly banned in an effort to contain the coronavirus.
In his blue and white car, Zhang Lei is the rare sight on the streets of Wuhan.
During normal times, Mr. Zhang, 32, is a taxi driver in this Chinese city of 11 million at the epicenter of the outbreak. But after the local government abruptly locked down the city late last month, Mr. Zhang became one of the thousands of people who have volunteered to help ease transportation woes.
Mr. Zhang, who wears a powder blue protective suit, face mask and goggles when driving, is not permitted to transport residents suspected of having the virus. Ambulances are supposed to handle that. Most of his passengers are poor, older residents who don’t have children or whose families ares outside Wuhan and can’t come home because of the quarantine.
“It’s heartbreaking,” he says. “There is no one to take care of them.”
The free rides are arranged by neighborhood committees, which typically serve as a go-between for residents and the local government.
Mr. Zhang makes no effort to conceal the mixed motivations behind his altruism.
“Boredom!” he exclaimed on a recent afternoon, when asked why he decided to volunteer for the job, then quickly added: “Second, to serve the people. Everyone is cooped up at home all day, so I may as well do something to contribute to society.”
What’s it like to be trapped on a cruise

g.sarkar wrote:Message for Johnji and UlanBatoriji:
ॐ द्यौः शान्तिरन्तरिक्षं शान्तिः
पृथिवी शान्तिरापः शान्तिरोषधयः शान्तिः ।
Brothers
Gautam

g.sarkar wrote: https://thediplomat.com/2020/02/sino-pa ... -epidemic/
Sino-Pakistan Relations Amid the Coronavirus Epidemic
The coronavirus outbreak revealed the weakest link in China-Pakistan relations: people-to-people ties.
By Eram Ashraf, February 04, 2020
The creation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)

chetak wrote:

John wrote:The media is rarely covering Coronavirus and buisness news channels are filled with analysts who are calling that it peaked, flu is more deadlier and we are all good. So it seems like you are the one blindly following them.

madhu wrote:

John wrote:The media is rarely covering Coronavirus and buisness news channels are filled with analysts who are calling that it peaked, flu is more deadlier and we are all good. So it seems like you are the one blindly following them.

i dont think that we have hit peak. there is a very good paper that tells that the peak is expected to be around April. As per paper(which uses SIER), reproductive number for 2019-nCoV was 2·68 (95% CrI 2·47–2·86) and that 75815 individuals (95% CrI 37 304–130 330) have been infected in Wuhan as of Jan 25, 2020. (official fig 6000 )The epidemic doubling time was 6·4 days (95% CrI 5·8–7·1). transmissibility, the Wuhan epidemic would peak around April, 2020

on the other hand one question i have is, that the paper telling "75 815 individuals (95% CrI 37 304–130 330) have been infected in Wuhan as of Jan 25, 2020". these numbers look much closer to Tencent leaked data(154,023 infections and 24,589 deaths as on Feb 1). is my understanding correct?