Coronavirus COVID-19 Thread

Aramsolari

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Did some sleuthing around on the entry on Wikipedia and it says a common ancestor to the Coronavirus has been discovered to be around since 8000 BCE! Seems like all the human strains all came from bats though.
 
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NaffNaffBobFace

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UK numbers for today 12th April:

Total confirmed 84,279 with 5288 new. Total perished 10,612 with 737 new.

Ignore the spike on the 10th, probably wrong but thems the numbers I got. Bear in mind it's a bank holiday weekend so too early to celebrate a reduction in deaths (down around 200 from the two previous days), it may be anomaly due to patchy weekend reporting:

Chartorama12-04-20.jpg


UK Prime Minister now out of hospital, lovely news, and taking an extended period of rest as one would expect. A statement put out today states his condition could have gone "Either way" and that his life was without a doubt saved, which seems to be in stark contrast to previous reports of having only been in for precautionary measures.

 
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Aramsolari

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UK numbers for today 12th April:

Total confirmed 84,279 with 5288 new. Total perished 10,612 with 737 new.

Ignore the spike on the 10th, probably wrong but thems the numbers I got. Bear in mind it's a bank holiday weekend so too early to celebrate a reduction in deaths (down around 200 from the two previous days), it may be anomaly due to patchy weekend reporting:

View attachment 15478

UK Prime Minister now out of hospital and taking an extended period of rest. A statement put out today states his condition could have gone "Either way" which seems to be in stark contrast to previous reports of having only been in for precautionary measures.

I hope this forces Johnson and the rest of the Tories to look at the NHS in a better light. A friend of mine works as a doctor in the NHS and the consensus among her peers and her is that the Conservatives under fund the NHS yet treat it as a means to score political points (ie. Vote Leave to Save the NHS £350 million a week!). She believes that they would privatise the NHS if they could. They certainly can't now, it would be political (and literal) suicide.
 

NaffNaffBobFace

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I hope this forces Johnson and the rest of the Tories to look at the NHS in a better light. A friend of mine works as a doctor in the NHS and the consensus among her peers and her is that the Conservatives under fund the NHS yet treat it as a means to score political points (ie. Vote Leave to Save the NHS £350 million a week!). She believes that they would privatise the NHS if they could. They certainly can't now, it would be political (and literal) suicide.
I can't say you're wrong, that's how it looks from the cheap seats where I am too. In the county of Lincolnshire (the second largest in the UK at 2,687 square miles) there are 3 hospitals. At one point the plan was to close all but one of them, which would have left some residents one hours travel in any direction from a hospital.

My father in law used to toil in hospital maintenance, he pointed out to change the lightbulbs in a ward it cost several thousand pounds not due to the materials or labor, but purely down to the private contract the hospital had to use. He estimated the cost of the bulbs and labor time would not have been much more than £200.
 

Aramsolari

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I can't say you're wrong, that's how it looks from the cheap seats where I am too. In the county of Lincolnshire (the second largest in the UK at 2,687 square miles) there are 3 hospitals. At one point the plan was to close all but one of them, which would have left some residents one hours travel in any direction from a hospital.

My father in law used to toil in hospital maintenance, he pointed out to change the lightbulbs in a ward it cost several thousand pounds not due to the materials or labor, but purely down to the private contract the hospital had to use. He estimated the cost of the bulbs and labor time would not have been much more than £200.
Yeah there's certainly waste in the NHS. My friend works out of Brighton and her view is that there's too much middle management staff and not enough clinical/medical staff. The system shouldn't be dismantled, it should be made more efficient. More doctors/nurses and less 'administrators' as they say.
 
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August

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That is great news for Australia.

With the close proximity and high rate of travel between you and Asian countries, I would have expected way higher numbers.
We basically shut out borders, even inter-state travel is restricted. Financially it’s not great but everyone is in the same position.
 
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August

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I hope that the end result of this is more focus on the long-term viability of our public infrastructure and manufacturing capacity.

I really hope those countries struggling get a break soon.
 
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August

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As at 6:00am on 13 April 2020, there have been 6,322 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia. There have been 33 new cases since 6:00am yesterday. Of the 6,322 confirmed cases in Australia, 61 have died from COVID-19. More than 356,000 tests have been conducted across Australia.

239 current cases require hospitalisation, and of these 81 are in intensive care.



Annotation 2020-04-13 121910.jpg
 

Bambooza

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So in layman's terms, could you say that this is a completely new mutation of a virus that's been around for awhile?
Yep, it's a new mutation of a virus that's been around for ages, thus why is called noval (new)

I believe so? Although coming from the animal kingdom it's more likely to be totally new? Unless it went human > animal > human again?

My assumption and resulting concern was that with a new mutation could come new issues.
This is the best part. Most viruses are human > animal > human with migrating birds being the biggest source of transmission and incubation of the yearly flu. If you want to get a good jumping-off point you can watch the Netflix series Pandemic especially episode 3 which skims into how scientists are testing animals looking for emerging new viruses. From there if you really want to go down the rabbit hole be prepared to see just how fragile life is.


You are correct, the virus is a new mutation of a virus family that has been around for a while. It's related to the betacoronavirus strains that caused both the MERS and SARS outbreaks in humans previously.
Yep. Honestly, I am surprised it took so long for something like this to happen given how many hotspots of the betacoronavirus over the past decade.
 

Vavrik

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Yep. Honestly, I am surprised it took so long for something like this to happen given how many hotspots of the betacoronavirus over the past decade.
I think betacoronavirus strains have our attention now. The MERS and SARS variants though they were more likely fatal seemed to have transmission issues, there have probably been other betacoronavirus variants in the mix over the years that just managed to infect a few people before dying off. They would have looked like flu, and the people would have either died quickly or recovered and thought they had a flu. "Nothing to really worry about."

But virus strains evolve fast. There's no intelligence to it, it's just change mutations these things go through from random evolution events. You know what's really funny, is a good chunk of our own DNA appears to be from the RNA of virus's that we've managed to co-opt into our own DNA. It's a process that probably takes 1000's of years, if not millions. Some of them are beneficial, and some others seem to be sleeping giants.

You seem to either be learning fast, or you have some experience. When I want to say something, often you've already beat me to it, and I have no argument with that. Keep it up!
 

Bambooza

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I think betacoronavirus strains have our attention now. The MERS and SARS variants though they were more likely fatal seemed to have transmission issues, there have probably been other betacoronavirus variants in the mix over the years that just managed to infect a few people before dying off. They would have looked like flu, and the people would have either died quickly or recovered and thought they had a flu. "Nothing to really worry about."

But virus strains evolve fast. There's no intelligence to it, it's just change mutations these things go through from random evolution events. You know what's really funny, is a good chunk of our own DNA appears to be from the RNA of virus's that we've managed to co-opt into our own DNA. It's a process that probably takes 1000's of years, if not millions. Some of them are beneficial, and some others seem to be sleeping giants.

You seem to either be learning fast, or you have some experience. When I want to say something, often you've already beat me to it, and I have no argument with that. Keep it up!
I was minoring in pre med with a goal of biomedical engineering before realizing programming would be far more profitable. So I still have lots of contacts with those who went on into the medical profession or drug research. And as much as the advances of bioengineering, especially with CRISPR, intrigue me I do not think I have the time or resources to go back to school.
 

Radegast74

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This was in the paper, they took the data from 2016-18 for the other diseases and averaged them to come up with an avreage weekly total, and then used last weeks COVID-19 deaths to make a comparison (since we won't have the data for 2020 for the other diseases for a year or more...sheesh, the 2019 data wasn't even available yet for the other diseases...)
Screen Shot 2020-04-13 at 11.11.50 AM.png
 
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NaffNaffBobFace

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UK numbers for today 13th of April.

Total confirmed 88,621 with 4,342 new, total died 11,329 with 717 new.

Again, too early to celebrate falling numbers, it could be Thursday before all info is in from the Bank Holiday weekend.

Chartorama13-04-20.jpg
 
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Vavrik

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I was minoring in pre med with a goal of biomedical engineering before realizing programming would be far more profitable. So I still have lots of contacts with those who went on into the medical profession or drug research. And as much as the advances of bioengineering, especially with CRISPR, intrigue me I do not think I have the time or resources to go back to school.
It's funny, we have a similar background. I was taking chemistry with a strong interest in biochem which was a emerging industry, but an accident involving misplaced hydrochloric acid changed my career path. After I got out of the hospital, I was going to lose the entire year because I had to wait a year to retake the semester. But if I switched to computer science I could continue and take some night school classes to catch up and only really lose one semester. Except I discovered I loved computer science even more.
Because of my interest in biochem, I ended up spending 2/3rd of my career designing software for food and drug regulation, research and development, and disease control. The other 2/3rd was spent doing the same thing for the oil industry and a smattering of physicists. Yeah I had a few issues with time management.
 

Ayeteeone

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@Montoya this might deserve its own thread.. I did not find it mentioned elsewhere when searching.

As gamers, one thing our group has available is processing power. So let's kick in some of that to fight this beast. These are two co-operative projects that have been researching the virus.

Folding@home - can run on Windows and some Linux

Rosetta@home - running this on a Ubuntu box

And an article here talking about them.

Linus Tech Tips has not only covered some of this, they provided a server to help manage data for the Folding@home project. So that's a resource for those who prefer video lol.
 
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Sraika

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@Montoya this might deserve its own thread.. I did not find it mentioned elsewhere when searching.

As gamers, one thing our group has available is processing power. So let's kick in some of that to fight this beast. These are two co-operative projects that have been researching the virus.

Folding@home - can run on Windows and some Linux

Rosetta@home - running this on a Ubuntu box

And an article here talking about them.

Linus Tech Tips has not only covered some of this, they provided a server to help manage data for the Folding@home project. So that's a resource for those who prefer video lol.
i tried the rosetta one, but it was kinda boring so i gave up after 45m lol
probably a bad sign xD
 
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