new deadly human-to-human-transmissible coronavirus emerges out of China

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Tuesday, May 5, 2026 22:21
VIEWED: 203741
PAGE 23 of 283

Cool.

Good luck everybody.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

How deadly pathogens have escaped the lab — over and over again
Research into dangerous viruses and bacteria is important, but for the deadliest pathogens, it’s not clear the benefits are worth the risks.

In 1977, the last case of smallpox was diagnosed in the wild.

The victim was Ali Maow Maalin of Somalia. The World Health Organization tracked down every person he’d been in face-to-face contact with to vaccinate everyone at risk and find anyone who might have caught the virus already. Thankfully, they found no one had. Maalin recovered, and smallpox appeared to be over forever.

That moment came at the end of a decades-long campaign to eradicate smallpox — a deadly infectious disease that killed about 30 percent of those who contracted it — from the face of the earth. Around 500 million people died of smallpox in the century before it was annihilated.

But in 1978, the disease cropped back up — in Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. Janet Parker was a photographer https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-45101091 at Birmingham Medical School. When she developed a horrifying rash, doctors initially brushed it off as chicken pox. After all, everyone knew that smallpox had been chased out of the world — right?

Parker got worse and was admitted to the hospital, where testing determined that she had smallpox after all. She died of it a few weeks later.

How did she get a disease that was supposed to have been eradicated?

It turned out that the building that Parker worked in also contained a research laboratory, one of a handful where smallpox was studied by scientists who were trying to contribute to the eradication effort. Some papers https://books.google.com/books?id=mUhdsCUjJeQC&pg=PA12#v=onepage&a
mp;q&f=false reported https://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/04/archives/smallpox-is-not-dead.html that the lab was badly mismanaged, with important precautions ignored because of haste. (The doctor who ran the lab died by suicide https://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/04/archives/smallpox-is-not-dead.html shortly after Parker was diagnosed.) Somehow, smallpox escaped the lab to infect an employee elsewhere in the building. Through sheer luck and a rapid response from health authorities, including a quarantine of more than 300 people, the deadly error didn’t turn into an outright pandemic.

Could something like that happen today?

All over the world, bio research labs handle deadly pathogens, some with the potential to cause a pandemic. Sometimes, researchers make pathogens even deadlier https://www.vox.com/2019/2/17/18225938/biologists-are-trying-to-make-b
ird-flu-easier-to-spread-can-we-not in the course of their research (as Science Magazine reported last month, the US government just approved two such experiments after years of keeping them on hold).

Research into viruses can help us develop cures and understand disease progression. We can’t do without this research. But on a few notable occasions, it’s gone dangerously wrong and even killed people.

Reviewing the incidents, it looks like there are many different points of failure — machinery that’s part of the containment process malfunctions; regulations aren’t sufficient or aren’t followed. Human error means live viruses are handled instead of dead ones.

Sometimes, these errors could be deadly. “If an enhanced novel strain of flu escaped from a laboratory and then went on to cause a pandemic, then causing millions of deaths is a serious risk,” Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, told me.

It’s not that there’s a high rate of mistakes in these labs; the rate of mistakes is actually quite low. But it’s one thing to run a one-in-thousands chance of killing a handful of others from a mistake — the odds we face over a lifetime of driving. It’s another thing entirely to accept a similar probability of killing millions of people.

The cost-benefit analysis for pathogens which might kill the people exposed or a handful of othe

NOTIFY: N  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

A very smart person ... I think it was RUE ... once told me that people are very poor at one thing: VIGILANCE. You might start awake after hearing tiger-like sounds, but after stirring up the fire and staring into the dark for an hour, your eyes start to close.

Or maybe you're on watch for eight hours ... but only manage to be alert for five. That's why we have nuclear power-plant operators sleeping on the job. It's no surprise that Chernobyl happened at night. And usually the worst disasters happen when three or four low-probability things happen. But "low" probability doesn't mean "no" probability, and if you do something, anything, for tens of thousands of hours (fly airplanes, run nuclear power plants, conduct research into deadly pathogens) eventually you run into that "tail" end of the bell curve, when those three or four or five things happened. Maybe the answer to research into deadly organisms should be conducted out in the boondocks, and everyone who works there has to live there, without their families, or any direct contact with the rest of the world.

*****

Well, even as China seems to be getting control of the virus, the WHO and the CDC seem to be getting more and more pessimistic. China and Hong Kong are doing what they're doing by means that would not be tolerated ... or even possible ... in Europe or North America ... creating "cordon sanitaires" and dragging people off the streets en masse and stuffing them into quarantine. Or quarantining entire apartment buildings.


Which means, IMHO, that unless you manage to keep these people isolated FROM EACH OTHER all you will manage to do is create more new cases.

And even isolating people individually doesn't seem to work ... the Diamond Princess cruise ship, an exquisite yet terrifying experiment in quarantining the sick with the well ... has experience a 30% jump in cases

Quote:

---

Toll of infected passengers and crew aboard 'the Diamond Princess' climbs to 285; The US arranges a charter plane for Americans aboard ship.

---

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-says-nearly-2000-doctors-
nurses-infected-shortages-medical-supplies-persist

Clearly, whatever they're doing aboard the ship isn't working; let's hope they figure it out before EVERYONE gets infected!

*****

And just an "I told you so", which I should post in the relevant thread ... I have been thumping for quite a few years under What are America's interests? that the USA ... and indeed ALL nations interested in self-preservation ... should have as self-sufficient economy and neutral balance of trade as possible. The reason for that thinking is that highly centralized and interconnected production, while extremely profitable, is also extremely FRAGILE. I have pointed out several cases ... the plastics factory in Japan that was the only source of chip-making plastic which caught on fire, leaving the world with no ability to make memory sticks, the JUST IN TIME delivery which leaves every production facility hostage to any interrruption in transportation ...

Well, here we have China, "factory to the world" (and also source of cheap migrant labor into S Korea and Japan) ... a position which it coveted and which "advanced" nations were willing to give up ... in essence shutting down to control the spread of the Wuhan virus.

Yanno, we can do without Apple products. But China is a source in a vast and unaccounted SUPPLY CHAIN for a vast number of products, from car parts to textiles. They disrupted our entire recycling industry when they stopped taking our contaminated plastics ... what would happen if they were to shut down almost entirely?

When I was working, I had to order specialty chemicals to use as standards so we could analyze a wide variety of industrial and household products. Acrylic glue for packaging tape, the kind so beloved by Amazon. Resins for autobody paints. Surfactants for cleaners and stabilizers/anti

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

Question, kiki: What is the fastest turnaround that you've seen for coronavirus 2019? Time from exposure to testing positive?

Is it possible that these "new" cases on the cruise ship were spread AFTER the quarantine?

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

I could go and look this up, but this timetable I dug out of memory is reasonably OK. The fastest turnaround I know of is on the quarantined ship. The infectious passenger was on the ship for roughly 4@ 24hr-days. He tested positive roughly 4 days after he debarked. The ship was eventually quarantined at Yokohama 2 days after that, which is when people started being tested (and it wasn't reported as such, but it seems that they were tested 'for cause' - ie because of concerning symptoms), and a number of people tested postive.

So in the span of 4days he infected a number of people, and people started testing positive 10days after he boarded. But as the news has told us, there are many false negatives, and there may be an incubation period of up to 24days.

Despite that the newly positive are well within the 24day window, my personal opinion - based on nothing more than my personal sense of how quickly the virus moves through a population by unknown means and how many people have been infected - is that these represent secondary infections.

Here's some information (dug out of memory, which I haven't verified or followed up on) that might explain to you why I feel that way. In Hong Kong, a man and a woman in separate apartments 2 or 3 floors apart, with the man as far as I know not leaving his apartment in weeks - both tested positive for 2019-nCoV. So how did he get it?

They were apparently on the same plumbing waste stack and vent with the man 2 or 3 floors below the woman. Some illegal waste line modification meant that the man's waste stack vent was ultimately open to the apartment air. IN ADDITION, there's historical precedent for the spread of SARS through apartment building waste lines: one building became contaminated and people contracted SARS because - for some reason not clear to me - there was no water in the P-traps. So the waste lines were venting into breathing air and that's how people got exposed. So it seems to me entirely possible that he became exposed through his waste stack vent line.

While the people who study these things claim the ship's ventilation system couldn't possibly be spreading 2019-nCoV (but there's always a chance they're wrong), it could also be spreading through the waste system.

Anyway, I see the potential for spread. I don't think (and it's obvious to me) the virus is as locked-down as they imagine it is. And I don't believe one person created an initial infection event of nearly 300 people all by himself.

NOTIFY: N  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

I was curious about how the CDC now does surveillance. Back in the day when I worked at the county hospital, it participated in CDC flu surveillance, which was: during flu season, the hospital received a number of swabs+media from the CDC to be used to sample patients. When a person who looked like they had flu came in to the ER, swab samples were taken and put in the special media and stored, till they were shipped off to the CDC for determination. That was it.

So I was curious how surveillance might be done now, for SARS-COV-2.

Apparently surveillance occurs through several mechanisms. One is participation of a vast majority of ERs and other participants in symptom tracking, through a national shared database, a "cloud-based BioSense Platformexternal, a secure integrated electronic health information system with standardized analytic tools and processes." This was legislated in the 2002, "Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002". By tracking the numbers of patients with symptoms, where the symptoms seem to be clustering together into some kind of pattern (cough + fever + history of travel to China), to see if a particular cluster of symptoms is surging, it's hoped that epidemics will be detected early.


When it comes to the test kits themselves to test for the virus (what I think they call virilogic surveillance), it's made to be used on a particular instrument (Applied Biosystems 7500 Fast DX Real-Time PCR Instrument with SDS 1.4 software). Apparently the first 400 test kits had 1 bad reagent and so worked poorly; the CDC is working on preparing a better batch. I didn't find a list of who might have received those kits, but I imagine either large public laboratories or research institutions with the appropriate instrument.

When it comes to persons under investigation (for possible 2019-nCoV infection) there are levels of risk and isolation recommended for each category. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/risk-assessment.html Just giving this a quick glance, it seems to me that the vast majority of the infected people on the Diamond Princess would have been considered low-risk, because they either weren't in close contact with the index patient, or they were isolated in their cabins from pretty much everybody else except their cabin-mates during quarantine. "Low Risk - Being in the same indoor environment (e.g., a classroom, a hospital waiting room) as a person with symptomatic laboratory-confirmed 2019-nCoV infection for a prolonged period of time but not meeting the definition of close contact"

What about mass detention? Nothing in the CDC guidance forbids it.

Quote:

---

Recommendations for Exposure Risk Management

State and local authorities have primary jurisdiction for isolation and other public health orders within their respective jurisdictions. Federal public health authority primarily extends to international arrivals at ports of entry and to preventing interstate communicable disease threats.

CDC recognizes that decisions and criteria to use such public health measures may differ by jurisdiction. Consistent with principles of federalism, state and local jurisdictions may choose to make decisions about isolation, other public health orders, and monitoring that exceed those recommended in federal guidance.

The issuance of a public health order should be considered in the context of other less restrictive means that could accomplish the same public health goals. People under public health orders must be treated with respect, fairness, and compassion, and public health authorities should take steps to reduce the potential for stigma (e.g., through outreach to affected communities, public education campaigns). Considerable, thoughtful planning by public health authorities is needed to implement public health orders properly. Specifically, measures must be in place to provide shelter, food, water, a

NOTIFY: N  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME