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#361 |
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Join Date: Apr 2004
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#362 |
Philosopher
Join Date: Jul 2004
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"The cure for everything is salt water - tears, sweat or the sea." Isak Dinesen |
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#363 |
Graduate Poster
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#364 |
Nasty Woman
Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 85,649
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Interesting. It would appear we need to drop the snake connection altogether unless some better evidence than a possible correlation turns up.
CDC: Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats, and bats. Livescience: He added that there is no solid evidence that coronaviruses can infect hosts other than mammals and birds. Brandão is currently investigating whether coronaviruses can infect snakes. |
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#365 |
Show me the monkey!
Join Date: Jul 2005
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#366 |
Illuminator
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Olomouc, Czech Republic
Posts: 3,124
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I would expect we will never know. This virus is too stealthy for that.
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#367 |
Nasty Woman
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Trump lost and he knows it.
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#368 |
Show me the monkey!
Join Date: Jul 2005
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So now I want to know if bats were in season back on November 9th or if they were already hibernating and unavailable even to the bat hunters.
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#369 |
Nasty Woman
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Trump lost and he knows it.
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#370 |
Show me the monkey!
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#371 |
Illuminator
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Olomouc, Czech Republic
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I don't think I do. I just don't understand how sequencing the genome will help in tracing the first human patient, who might have not showed any symptoms. If the virus induced severe, unmistakable symptoms in every human, it would be possible. But we know this virus does not.
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#372 |
Illuminator
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Olomouc, Czech Republic
Posts: 3,124
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New data about how the virus can spread asymptomatically:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/31/h...udy/index.html |
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#373 |
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#374 |
Illuminator
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#375 |
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#376 |
Nasty Woman
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Trump lost and he knows it.
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#377 |
Nasty Woman
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Trump lost and he knows it.
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#378 |
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#379 |
Nasty Woman
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Trump lost and he knows it.
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#380 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Sacramento
Posts: 49,813
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After all, all those chinks are not really human.....
Aside from the sheer heartlessness of it, it's stupid from an economic point of view. If the VIrus manages to do severe damage to the Chinese Economy, it will do severe damage to the World Economy, which will do damage to the US economy. |
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Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay - and claims a halo for his dishonesty. Robert Heinlein. |
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#381 |
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#382 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Sacramento
Posts: 49,813
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Bats took up residence in a abandoned building just a couple of miles from where I live.
Needless to say, with a few days of this being known, the Batman emblem showed up on the side of the building.... Bats are much,much more common then people think....largely because Bats are nocturnal creatures and are not around in the daylight much. And except for the danger of disease the kind in the US are pretty harmless. Most are fruit bats and seldom eat meat, and certainly will not attack something as big as human being. |
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Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay - and claims a halo for his dishonesty. Robert Heinlein. |
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#383 |
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#384 |
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#385 |
Nasty Woman
Join Date: Feb 2005
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They've built bat boxes in my neighborhood, the bats nest in them. At dusk you can sometimes see them flying after insects.
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#386 |
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#387 |
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#388 |
Illuminator
Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: United States
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Phylogenetic analyses of some hantaviruses show a bat link as well.
Hantavirus diseases make coronavirus diseases look like a walk in the park. |
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#389 |
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After some reading I found that the bat species, Rhinolophus affinis, seems to be the most likely candidate. There is an unpublished scientific paper on coronavirus in this species and it is a 96% match with the current epidemic. There are other species in the same genus with coronavirus with slightly less match percentage (still above 90%).
The common name for this bat is Intermediate Horseshoe Bat. They are common throughout South Asia, Southern and Central China and Southeast Asia. They are insectivores. The habitat is caves and sometimes hollow trees. I can't find records of this species living in homes or occupied dwellings. In spite of a very close match there is no guarantee that this is the source animal. |
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#390 |
Philosopher
Join Date: Apr 2004
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"A closed mouth gathers no feet" "Ignorance is a renewable resource" P.J.O'Rourke "It's all god's handiwork, there's little quality control applied", Fox26 reporter on Texas granite You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it. Art Buchwald |
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#391 |
Show me the monkey!
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#392 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Sacramento
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Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay - and claims a halo for his dishonesty. Robert Heinlein. |
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#393 |
Nasty Woman
Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 85,649
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Wow, Trump's going crazy. No surprise with his ignorance. So now Chinese nationals coming from China are banned from the US.
But what's he going to do when the virus spreads in multiple countries? Ban half the world from entering the US? He's probably just trying to save himself. |
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#394 |
Maledictorian
Join Date: Aug 2016
Posts: 14,265
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Could the virus come to US households via the millions of Amazon packages with Chinese products ordered all the time?
I just remembered the Osaka Flu from The Simpsons.... |
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Ceterum autem censeo fox et amicis esse delendam. |
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#395 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Sacramento
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Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay - and claims a halo for his dishonesty. Robert Heinlein. |
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#396 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Sacramento
Posts: 49,813
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I just got a boardgame from a US company who has it printing done in Japan (Very common nowdays) and I admit that thought crossed my mind?
Though so far as we know, it has to be transmitted from living organism to living organism. I think it is important we don't add to the hysteria by spreading BS rumors and peddling theories as facts. |
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Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay - and claims a halo for his dishonesty. Robert Heinlein. |
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#397 |
Nasty Woman
Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 85,649
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It can't spread on Amazon packages. When have facts ever stopped Trump from revenge on his enemies?
Remember how Trump overreacted to ebola? Including his deep state paranoia that the CDC was covering up? Kaiser Health News Morning Briefing
Quote:
Quote:
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#398 |
Show me the monkey!
Join Date: Jul 2005
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Well I suppose it could have been pilots or airlines refusing to do China flights instead of a government ban.
I read that immediate family of US citizens are exempt from the ban. They will likely require the quarantine. |
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Bigfoot believers and Bigfoot skeptics are both plumb crazy. Each spends more than one minute per year thinking about Bigfoot. |
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#399 |
The Grammar Tyrant
Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 27,827
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I'm beginning to wonder if the virus isn't capable of sustained human to human transmission, or is just quite difficult to catch.
The first Japanese case was a tour bus driver who had been driving a tour of people from Wuhan and was diagnosed one week ago today. If he came down with it and it's easily spread, other people the tour came in contact with would be showing up by infected by now. All the hotel, shop, restaurant and tourism operators they came in contact with and it seems they didn't pass it on to them. Time will tell, but the numbers aren't growing outside China as fast as they would be in a pandemic. The explosion of cases seen in Mexican 'flu hasn't happened. Yet... |
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The point of equilibrium has passed; satire and current events are now indistinguishable. |
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#400 |
Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Jan 2006
Posts: 12,632
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We'd be up to at least 100 confirmed cases in the US if this were nearly as contagious as flu or RSV, I'm 99.9% sure. I want to say in the 2009 zoonosis/pandemic, once it was detected in the US, it went up by about 30-40 cases per day for a few days in the early days. We're at 7 confirmed cases total in the US now.
This technically IS a pandemic right now by all definitions, but it looks like a pandemic that can (thankfully, probably) be controlled ("controlled" in an "eradicated" sense) with quarantine, like SARS was. I'm sure it is capable of sustained human to human transmission under the right conditions, but that's a very different things from it being as contagious as flu (where you're liable to infect 10 or 20 people before you have so much as a slightly stopped up nose) so I think the public health authorities are doing the right thing to be going at quarantine measures with serious force. |
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"We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically — not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are." - Carl Sagan |
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