Replies to post #1470 on iHub Mining Sector Entrance Lobby

[echarters]

Me believe what I write? Are you crazy? Sheesh.. get a hold of yourself man! I hope you didn't believe it too! Of course I CAN believe Beijing Health researcher and Coronavirus expert at the University of Beijing says when she states a billion people will get the virus worldwide and there is no way to stop it, and it's "here to stay" But we know SHE doesn't believe hereself or what she says either! I am naive to, therefore. She is only a person who devoted here life to studying the coronavirus and its diseases in a research lab. How right can she be? Experts can be wrong, therefore she is.

I don't personally believe it will go that far. I compare it to 1918 flu which was just as morbid, and it burnt itelf out in less than two years killing only 18 million worldwide. If SARS afflicted 1 billion, it would kill 100 million people worldwide. I think its mutation speed will allow us get lucky before that figure is reached.

There are people who say that we didn't have the techniques and antibiotics in 1918, so a new 1918 flu or similar viral illness would not be able to kill that many. They say "secondary infection", presumably combatable by antibiotics (pleurisy), killed the people in 1918. Guess what. They don't have a clue what they are talking about. Respiratory flu, filling the lungs with water and damaging the alveoli caused the deaths back then, and that was caused solely by the flu virus, not "secondary infection" It killed people between 20 and 40 predominantly, and hardly anyone else, so it was called the young people's flu. It was also called the black flu as people turned blue from lack of oxygen, and got black blotches on their skin. If they had buckets of penicillin in 1918, the death rate would have been hardly an iota less.

I am sticking my head in the sand. Coronovirus and SARS cannot spread to 30 countries (has it?) if we ban flying and walking and talking and all people with temperatures are shot on sight and burned. (that is what the laser stand off temperature gun is for, it reads temperatures and carries out executions)

I know it will work. Coronavirus survives for up to six days on metal and linen surfaces, but reading a newspaper a SARS afflicted paper boy left you CANNOT cause the disease, as you absently mindedly pick you nose and read the paper, contemplating this fact.

The common cold does not get around by being easy to transmit by coughing and sneezing droplets, although it can be spread that way. It gets its currency by being a persistent surface-spread, out-of-the-body virus. It hang around places. It spreads by touch, not just the air like flus can easily. But in this way does it spread fast? You bet it does. It can cover a town in a month. A country in a few more. Amazing, but that is the speed of readily communicable, airborne and surface-borne diseases.

We can say SARS was lept on because it was so fatal. It may be up to ten per cent fatal, as is the average of the mortal RNA diseases. It is a hummdinger in that it mutates so fast that a vaccine may be useless in a month. As well the virus has a very poor immune response. It incubates in the nasal passage, not in the blood stream. The nasal spray vaccine/viricide alpha-interferon may have promise for this reason.

VRA/AMEX Viragen

There are other promising companies right now with some trial drugs.

Cleanliness is good. Chlorine bleach is good. Limiting social contact is good. It saved many during the 1918 flu. Many stayed indoors and would not open the front door to any person to come in. It may have saved whole families.

EC<:-}

[echarters]

There are scads of other fairly survivable and also deadly communicable diseases. Smallpox is deadly but not that communicable by air. There was a large pool of resistance/immunity in the population. Edward Jenner noticed in the 17 hundreds that milkmaids did not get small pox because they had contracted cowpox from milking infected cows and this seemed to transfer immunity upon them. This gave Jenner the idea for vaccination, which arrested the march of smallpox by the general dissemination of the vaccination procedure.

What we are talking about is the pathology of the disease, not the survivability of it, or the likelihood of dying, really. And it is fairly communicable. Before you poo poo our perception that is containment is unlikely you should reflect on the containment of the far less communicable blood borne illnesses, like Syphilis, and Aids, and ask yourself how it is that they have spread so assuredly. (one factor is long incubation time, and difficulty of testing during the incubation period.) Then you should consult with disease pathologists and ask them what the likelihood that the disease will be stamped out by containment efforts is. When they look at you and shake their head, and say. "we hope that it might be, but in reality... nowhere else have we seen" ... and their voice trails off. You should get the general feeling what the true answer is, i.e. "We cannot guarantee that it will not spread with inexorable progress and with as great rapidity as the common cold does, just that it will have far more ferocious results."

Right now there are 9 people dying per day in China. The discharge rate is what counts here, as there are only 4000 people known to likely have the disease. If it is in tune with current figures, the discharge rate of healthy survivors, with or without immunity may be 90 per day.

Compared to an outbreak of bad influenza in China, this is a miniscule death rate in toto. So why worry? When Shanghai "B "swept through China in the 1980's it killed 350,000 people. that is up to 3000 per day. The difference is perhaps 100 million people got infected with Shanghai B in China. So the death rate was perhaps .35%. And those were only the far weaker people like the very young, or old and already sick. While corona virus picks off those, it also picks off healthy people in their prime, and kills 30 times as many per infected person.

The strange thing is in the US, the total deaths were far less and far less per infected individual for this serious flu. It could be predicted that people of advanced age, in nursing homes, and already ill, those prone to bronchities and pneumonia, would die. With Shanghai "B" perhaps 5000 such people died in North America. Only one person, probably by choking in coughing in Toronto. Flu vaccines probably saved many who were more prone to illness.

It does seem like the death rate upon contraction is about ten per cent. Or on the bright side, the survival rate is about 90% or perhaps higher if you are healthy and fairly young. The survivors may have some resistance from exposure to coronavirus in the past, as it is a ubiquitous illness in its milder forms.