Topic: Coronavirus outbreak

Ironically, the disease's relative non-lethality compared to stuff like MERS and Ebola is a big part of what's making it such a massive threat. Diseases that kill a large percentage of their hosts can be more easily isolated, and they also inspire alarm quickly enough for societies to mobilize extreme measures to contain them.

The devious thing about this is that the overall mortality rate is probably only 1% or less (the data suggests a huge fraction of infected people are asymptomatic or don't get sick enough to seek medical attention), but if you spread that among 7 billion+ people, you're looking at millions of deaths.

4/4/20 Update

Global Cases

Daily Increase

More and more I'm 100% positive there is no scenario in which 100% population does not get it. It's simply not possible. Food alone is the problem. As food delivery and pickup is booked solid almost everywhere, that means everyone must absolutely go to the stores, sick or not. Huge stock outages mean spending more time, touching more things, encountering more people just to do normal shopping. Quantity limits mean more frequent trips or trips to more stores. If everybody is congregating in the same locations, frequently and for long periods, and some percentage also goes other places then the vector is unaltered. We might as well just open the malls and everything else.

I'm starting to fear more and more the lockdowns are nothing more than political theater for cynical proposes that will do nothing to alter the course of infection, but make everything massively worse in the process. If they were truly serious about the lockdowns, like Italy, China, it would be heavily enforced, no interstate travel (oos plates would be found, no airlines running) it would be one thing. But all they've done is close most business, bankrupt most companies, and then actively encourage us to congregate and be vectors anyway, completely negating the point of the lockdown, and annihilating the economy and lives only to infect everyone anyway. Is everyone is still in grocery stores, everyone is still as exposed as if they were in a concert venue.

And i won't buy for any amount if money this thing is a natural occurrence. It's perfectly designed to run stealth and bypass every modern system of identification and containment. I don't think the Chinese deployed it as a weapon - that would have been stupid, but it's becoming clearer and clearer how well designed it is, how abnormally "perfect" it is.......i presume they were playing with weaponization of sars to keep in their back pocket and this is the result.... But it got out when it wasn't intended.

@Zeldafan79

I am not doctor no means, but I know Coronavirus spreads through droplets when people with COVID-19 sneeze or cough. That's why some places installed sneeze guards. I think that makes perfect sense to do such a thing. Now, restaurants to require customers to sign a waiver...yeah, I would eat somewhere else.

@NEStalgia

Either it was deliberately designed or......

There are thousands of viruses mutating and jumping species every day. The vast majority end up being ineffective at doing any real damage, so we never hear about them.

The only ones we end up hearing about, are the ones that are either incredibly deadly (e.g Ebola) or incredibly infectuous (e.g Covid-19), or both (e.g Spanish Flu, Black Death)

ok, Alex Jones

like I dunno about where you live but if you think America's been the best prepared for this, especially nowadays, oh honey, you poor soul. Poor naive soul. "Every modern system", is like a 9/10 on the "sure, Jan" scale.

@NEStalgia and china has been doing maneuvers in the south china sea. I think your onto something.

@NEStalgia Do you also believe the virus is turning the frogs gay?

I do question some of your reading comprehension skills, given the responses here.

Not a conspiracy, i explicitly said i doubt it was released intentionally. But the likelihood it was engineered seems ever more probable the more we find out about it. Be it part of bioweapons experimentation or "just to see what we can push it to." Not an actual attack on the world, that was likely just stupidity and recklessness in whatever lab was busy playing God. But a thing that shouldn't have been played with was played with. Or doesn't actually appear capable of evolving very quickly, which is why it remains deadly. It didn't adapt in that time to find all the right ways to hide.... It basically sprang into existence that way which itself isn't the most likely of occurences without some assistance.

Don't kid yourselves, bioweapons research and overzealous disease experimentation isn't conspiracy theory and isn't limited to China. The US, Russia, probably countless other countries have routinely done so for a long time. Lots of things get made in labs that should never be made at all. And an uneasy mix of luck and competence is all that keeps them from the public.

@WoomyNNYes I just learned from my coworker that the Prime Minister of Japan is due to make an announcement today, or tomorrow at the latest. He expects them to lock down Tokyo at the very least.

Tokyo is one of the highest density cities in the world, with large amounts of public transit, lots of massive buildings full of lots of people. And this virus is psuedo-airborne. Japan's defenses were/are strong because of the mask culture, but a defensive line is only as strong as its weakest point. There are always people who don't follow the rules, always people who think "It can't happen to me."

It was perhaps, just a matter of time.

@Heavyarms55 Yeah, my friend that has been working in Tokyo for the Olympics, just came back to the US a week or so ago. Looks like he made a smart move.

@WoomyNNYes Ummm not in my book. America is magnitudes more imperiled than Japan is right now. While it's possible (maybe likely) Japan could still see a major outbreak, America is smack in the middle of a nightmare right now. That sounds like trading the chance of a disaster for one already ongoing...

But I do suppose it depends where your friend returned to. If they live in a small town they can be a lot safer than in a big city right now. And that's true no matter what country you live in.

The problem here is that the virus can spread so easily, so Japan may see an epidemic too. The bigger problem is that some people don’t show symptoms and may not be tested

The US Air Force did genuinely try to make a chemical weapon that would turn their enemy gay, so that may not be a very good counter-point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb

I'm not sure what's more offensive: that they think all it takes to make a person gay is sprinkling some military-produced pixie dust on enemy soldiers, or that disciplined soldiers would suddenly turn into sex-hungry freaks once they developed an attraction to other men.

Then again, I guess if the people who authored that proposal were budding rapists who could picture themselves molesting female soldiers given the opportunity, they'd just naturally transfer that gross intuition over to gay men.

The real kicker would be if they managed to actually create a gay bomb, but it made their enemies more like spartans, who would fight more ferociously on the battlefields to impress their male lovers.

@Dezzy Okay if you actually read that article it highly suggests that it wouldn't have worked and lacked any controlled studies. It wouldn't be an effective weapon anyway because if your life is at risk because an enemy army in attacking, any sexual urges would be easily ignored by the body's natural "fight or flight" response. Unless the chemical was in addition to other psychoactive substances that suppressed fear and inhibited self control. Frankly at that point a powerful sleeping gas would certainly be more effective. But regardless most if not all modern armies have access to effective gas masks that would limit the affects of any weapons like these. Then you have the risk of blowback from any sort of chemical attack added in and - clearly someone in the US military wasn't thinking straight. Pun fully intended.

@Heavyarms55

Yes I realized it wouldn't actually work. But the point was that it's not inherently implausible that countries do try to create such things.

China probably do have a branch of their military dedicated to making chemical weapons, so it's not automatically wrong to suspect that. It's just probably not true in the case of this virus.

@Dezzy Well I imagine every major military force in the world has a department geared toward biological weapons. Both their use and countermeasures. And it's difficult to develop a shield to block a sword you don't have.

I don't buy into the idea that China is an evil nation and America is a just nation. Their players on the board each with their own agendas. I'd bet a month's pay that both have more than one laboratory researching the topic - whether they admit to it or not - whether it's known or secret.

I don't know if @NEStalgia or @Otustephan are correct. I think it's entirely possible that they are both right. It's not a stretch that a Chinese scientist discovered a natural mutation/evolution of an existing strain and was studying it for both offensive and defensive reasons - and someone messed up somehow and the virus got out. I don't think this idea is any less plausible than the whole "bat sh*t" theory. Or simply the idea that an existing strain just mutated on its own somewhere else.

On another note - is it bad that it scares me when people like Mike Pence talk about seeing progress? Because they say it and I fear that people will hear that kind of thing from authority figures and jump to "it's already over and we can go back to normal now" - even if that likely isn't what he meant. And if people go back to normal too early we run the risk of undoing any and all progress we've made...