https://news-af.feednews.com/news/detail/e451c8b293bc5d0118066f23f2b3583d?client=news
You may have prayed right!
First Corona Virus case confirmed in SA.
- Thread starter Chickenstrip
- Start date
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- Tags
- case corona virus
https://news-af.feednews.com/news/detail/e451c8b293bc5d0118066f23f2b3583d?client=news
You may have prayed right!
This is why we are "Social Distancing"
Corona Virus Cases..
New York
wk 1 - 2
wk 2 - 105
wk 3 - 613
France
wk 1 - 12
wk 2 - 191
wk 3 - 653
wk 4 - 4499
Iran
wk 1 - 2
wk 2 - 43
wk 3 - 245
wk 4 - 4747
wk 5 - 12729
Italy
wk 1 - 3
wk 2 - 152
wk 3 - 1036
wk 4 - 6362
wk 5 - 21157
Spain
wk 1 - 8
wk 3 - 674
wk 4 - 6043
India
wk 1 - 3
wk 2 - 24
wk 3 - 105
South Africa
wk 1 - 13
wk 2 - 116
The next two weeks are crucial for South Africa. If we take adequate precautions and flatten the curve, then we can break the tide of this Corona virus outbreak. Else we have a big problem on our hands, especially for the elderly and large immunocompromised population. So far so good... South Africa has done well in its fight to contain Corona Virus.
Now we are in stage 3 in which the Virus spreads through social contacts & in social gatherings. This is most critical stage when the number of confirmed cases spread exponentially everyday (what happened in Italy between last week of February & second week of March)...from 300 to 10,000. If South Africa is not able to manage this stage over the next 3 to 4 weeks then we could have confirmed cases not in Thousands but in Millions. This next month is crucial. That is why most events & public gatherings have been prohibited.
The next 30 days will be the most crucial in the medical History of South Africa. Take all precautions while at home & while outside for any important work. Precaution is NOT panic.
Be a responsible citizen by following instructions/advice & educate others to remain careful for the next month at least.
#CoronaVirus
FlattenTheCurve
Sent from my LYA-L09 using Tapatalk
Corona Virus Cases..
New York
wk 1 - 2
wk 2 - 105
wk 3 - 613
France
wk 1 - 12
wk 2 - 191
wk 3 - 653
wk 4 - 4499
Iran
wk 1 - 2
wk 2 - 43
wk 3 - 245
wk 4 - 4747
wk 5 - 12729
Italy
wk 1 - 3
wk 2 - 152
wk 3 - 1036
wk 4 - 6362
wk 5 - 21157
Spain
wk 1 - 8
wk 3 - 674
wk 4 - 6043
India
wk 1 - 3
wk 2 - 24
wk 3 - 105
South Africa
wk 1 - 13
wk 2 - 116
The next two weeks are crucial for South Africa. If we take adequate precautions and flatten the curve, then we can break the tide of this Corona virus outbreak. Else we have a big problem on our hands, especially for the elderly and large immunocompromised population. So far so good... South Africa has done well in its fight to contain Corona Virus.
Now we are in stage 3 in which the Virus spreads through social contacts & in social gatherings. This is most critical stage when the number of confirmed cases spread exponentially everyday (what happened in Italy between last week of February & second week of March)...from 300 to 10,000. If South Africa is not able to manage this stage over the next 3 to 4 weeks then we could have confirmed cases not in Thousands but in Millions. This next month is crucial. That is why most events & public gatherings have been prohibited.
The next 30 days will be the most crucial in the medical History of South Africa. Take all precautions while at home & while outside for any important work. Precaution is NOT panic.
Be a responsible citizen by following instructions/advice & educate others to remain careful for the next month at least.
#CoronaVirus
FlattenTheCurve
Sent from my LYA-L09 using Tapatalk
Here is the latest from the WHO website
New Cases and New Deaths are those recorded over the last 24 hours
This is a screen shot of the top counties by numbers
Sent from my LYA-L09 using Tapatalk
New Cases and New Deaths are those recorded over the last 24 hours
This is a screen shot of the top counties by numbers
Sent from my LYA-L09 using Tapatalk
Last edited:
en ou mense se '' Was jou hanne voor jy eet en moenie met die bure se hond , dogter of mampoer speel nie''
en ons het oorleef van 1918 af , so . nou .''drink- net mampoer , eet jou boontjies, bere Tuna , en ''waar is julle Jeys fluid''
en ons het oorleef van 1918 af , so . nou .''drink- net mampoer , eet jou boontjies, bere Tuna , en ''waar is julle Jeys fluid''
Here is the latest from the WHO website
New Cases and New Deaths are those recorded over the last 24 hours
This is a screen shot of the top counties by numbers
Sent from my LYA-L09 using Tapatalk
what is depressing , concert tic'd booked 27 MAYHere is the latest from the WHO website
New Cases and New Deaths are those recorded over the last 24 hours
This is a screen shot of the top counties by numbers
Sent from my LYA-L09 using Tapatalk
VISA'S confirmed
Ionian boat criuse = on hold
A visit to a dear friend Arizona/ New MEX -cancelled
The Palace - n/ Province ... gone
Hi all
Found this article. It was referenced on Twitter.
It is quite scary but I think it illustrates how important it is to do everything you can to avoid getting and spreading Coronavirus. I think the article runs the risk of making people too scared and hyping it. So don’t be too alarmed. But it has a good way of explaining how the virus can be transmitted and what happens when you get it. So I think it’s worth reading.
Most people who get the virus will be ok - around 80%. Our immune system will fight it and one recovers at home while resting. But 20% need help. And a portion of those get further progression, leading to severe pneumonia and even organ failure / sepsis in the worst case. The elderly and those with compromised immune systems are most at risk for the progression scenario.
Read the article, it never harms to understand things a bit better. Just be warned, it’s quite scary and don’t let it make you panic, rather try let it help.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/03/the-story-of-a-coronavirus-infection.html
Found this article. It was referenced on Twitter.
It is quite scary but I think it illustrates how important it is to do everything you can to avoid getting and spreading Coronavirus. I think the article runs the risk of making people too scared and hyping it. So don’t be too alarmed. But it has a good way of explaining how the virus can be transmitted and what happens when you get it. So I think it’s worth reading.
Most people who get the virus will be ok - around 80%. Our immune system will fight it and one recovers at home while resting. But 20% need help. And a portion of those get further progression, leading to severe pneumonia and even organ failure / sepsis in the worst case. The elderly and those with compromised immune systems are most at risk for the progression scenario.
Read the article, it never harms to understand things a bit better. Just be warned, it’s quite scary and don’t let it make you panic, rather try let it help.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/03/the-story-of-a-coronavirus-infection.html
Last edited:
Article credit - NYmag.com
Article URL - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/03/the-story-of-a-coronavirus-infection.html
How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It)
By Jeff Wise
Photo: Dr. F.A. Murphy/Getty Images/Visuals Unlimited
You call a friend and arrange to meet for lunch. It’s unseasonably springlike, so you choose a place with outdoor seating, which seems like it should be safer. As usual, you take all reasonable precautions: You use hand sanitizer, sit a good distance from other customers, and try to avoid touching your face, though that last part is hard. A part of you suspects that this whole thing might be overblown.
What you don’t know is that ten days ago, your friend’s father was a guest of his business partner at the University Club, where he caught the novel coronavirus from the wife of a cryptocurrency speculator. Three days after that, he coughed into his hand before opening the door of his apartment to welcome his son home. The saliva of COVID-19 patients can harbor half a trillion virus particles per teaspoon, and a cough aerosolizes it into a diffuse mist. As your friend walked through the door he took a breath and 32,456 virus particles settled onto the lining of his mouth and throat.
Viruses have been multiplying inside his body ever since. And as he talks, the passage of his breath over the moist lining of his upper throat creates tiny droplets of virus-laden mucus that waft invisibly into the air over your table. Some settle on the as-yet-uneaten food on your plate, some drift onto your fingers, others are drawn into your nasal sinus or settle into your throat. By the time you extend your hand to shake good-bye, your body is carrying 43,654 virus particles. By the time you’re done shaking hands, that number is up to 312,405.
One of the droplets gets drawn into the branching passages of your lungs and settles on the warm, wet surface, depositing virus particles into the mucus coating the tissue. Each particle is round and very small; if you magnified a human hair so that it was as wide as a football field, the virus particle would be four inches across. The outer membrane of the virus consists of an oily layer embedded with jagged protein molecules called spike proteins. These stick out like the protrusions on a knobby ball chew toy. In the middle of the virus particle is a coiled strand of RNA, the virus’s genetic material. The payload.
As the virus drifts through the lung’s mucus, it bumps into one of the cells that line the surface. The cell is considerably larger than the virus; on the football-field scale, it’s 26 feet across. A billion years of evolution have equipped it to resist attackers. But it also has a vulnerability — a backdoor. Protruding from its surface is a chunk of protein called angiotensin converting enzyme 2, or ACE2 receptor. Normally, this molecule plays a role in modulating hormone activity within the body. Today, it’s going to serve as an anchor for the coronavirus.
As the spike protein bumps up against the surface of the lung cell, its shape matches that of the ACE2 so closely that it sticks to it like adhesive. The membrane of the virus then fuses with the membrane of the cell, spilling the RNA contents into the interior of the lung cell. The virus is in.
The viral RNA gets busy. The cell has its own genetic material, DNA, that produces copied fragments of itself in RNA form. These are continuously copied and sent into the main body of the cell, where they provide instructions for how to make the proteins that carry out all the functions of the cell. It’s like Santa’s workshop, where the elves, dutifully hammering out the toys on Santa’s instructions, are complexes of RNA and protein called ribosomes.
As soon as the viral RNA encounters a ribosome, that ribosome begins reading it and building viral proteins. These proteins then help the viral RNA to copy itself, and these copies then hijack more of the cell’s ribosomes. Other viral proteins block the cell from fighting back. Soon the cell’s normal business is completely overwhelmed by the demands of the viral RNA, as its energy and machinery are occupied with building the components of countless replica viruses.
As they are churned out, these components are transferred on a kind of cellular conveyor belt toward the surface of the cell. The virus membrane and spike proteins wrap around RNA strands, and a new particle is ready. These collect in internal bubbles, called vesicles, that move to the surface, burst open, and release new virus particles into your body by the tens and hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile, spike proteins that haven’t been incorporated into new viruses embed themselves directly into the host cell’s membrane so that it latches onto the surface of an adjacent cell, like a pirate ship lashing itself to a helpless merchantman. The two cells then fuse, and a whole host of viral RNA swarms over into the new host cell.
All up and down your lungs, throat, and mouth, the scene is repeated over and over as cell after cell is penetrated and hijacked. Assuming the virus behaves like its relative, SARS, each generation of infection takes about a day and can multiply the virus a millionfold. The replicated viruses spill out into the mucus, invade the bloodstream, and pour through the digestive system.
You don’t feel any of this. In fact, you still feel totally fine. If you have any complaint at all, it’s boredom. You’ve been a dutiful citizen, staying at home to practice social distancing, and after two days of bingeing on the Fast & Furious franchise, you decide that your mental health is at risk if you don’t get outside.
You call up an ex, and she agrees to meet you for a walk along the river. You’re hoping that the end-of-the-world zeitgeist might kindle some afternoon recklessness, but the face mask she’s wearing kills the vibe. Also she tells you that she’s decided to move in with a guy she met at Landmark. You didn’t even know she was into Landmark. She gives you a warm hug as you say good-bye, and you tell her it was great to see her, but you leave feeling deflated. What she doesn’t know is that an hour before, you went to the bathroom and neglected to wash your hands afterward. The invisible fecal smear you leave on the arm of her jacket contains 893,405 virus particles. Forty-seven seconds after she gets home, she’ll hang up her coat and then scratch an itch at the base of her nose just before she washes her hands. In that moment, 9,404 viral particles will transfer to her face. In five days, an ambulance will take her to Mount Sinai.
Like a retail chain gobbled up by private equity, stripped for parts, and left to die, your infected cells spew out virus particles until they burn themselves out and expire. As fragments of disintegrated cells spread through your bloodstream, your immune system finally senses that something is wrong. White blood cells detect the fragments of dead cells and release chemicals called cytokines that serve as an alarm signal, activating other parts of the immune system to swing into action. When responding immune cells identify a cell that has become infected, they attack and destroy it. Within your body, a microscopic Battle of the Somme is raging with your immune system leveling its Big Berthas on both the enemy trenches and its own troops. As the carnage mounts, the body’s temperature rises and the infected area becomes inflamed.
Two days later, sitting down to lunch, you realize that the thought of eating makes you feel nauseated. You lie down and sleep for a few hours. When you wake up, you realize that you’ve only gotten worse. Your chest feels tight, and you’ve got a dry cough that just won’t quit. You wonder: Is this what it feels like? You rummage through your medicine cabinet in vain and ultimately find a thermometer in the back of your linen closet. You hold it under your tongue for a minute and then read the result: 102. ****, you think, and crawl back into bed. You tell yourself that it might just be the regular flu, and even if worse comes to worst, you’re young(-ish) and otherwise healthy. You’re not in the high-risk group.
You’re right, of course, in a sense. For most people infected with the coronavirus, that’s as far as it goes. With bed rest, they get better. But for reasons scientists don’t understand, about 20 percent of people get severely ill. Despite your relative youth, you’re one of them.
After four days of raging fever and feeling sore all over, you realize that you’re sicker than you’ve ever been in your life. You’ve got a dry cough that shakes you so hard that your back hurts. Fighting for breath, you order an Uber and head to the nearest emergency room. (You leave 376,345,090 virus particles smeared on various surfaces of the car and another 323,443,865 floating in aerosols in the air.)
At the ER, you’re examined and sent to an isolation ward. As doctors wait for the results of a test for the coronavirus, they administer a CT scan of your lungs, which reveals tell-tale “ground-glass opacities,” fuzzy spots caused by fluid accumulating where the immune-system battle is the most intense. Not only have you got COVID-19, but it’s led to a kind of intense and dangerous pneumonia called acute-respiratory-distress syndrome, or ARDS.
With all the regular beds already occupied by the many COVID-19 sufferers, you’re given a cot in a room alongside five other patients. Doctors put you on an intravenous drip to supply your body with nutrients and fluids as well as antiviral medicine. Within a day of your arrival, your condition deteriorates. You throw up for several days and start to hallucinate. Your heart rate slows to 50 beats a minute. When a patient in the next room dies, doctors take the ventilator he was using and put you on it. By the time the nurse threads the endotracheal tube down your throat, you’re only half-conscious of the sensation of it snaking deeper and deeper toward your lungs. You just lie there as she places tape over your mouth to keep the tube in place.
You’re crashing. Your immune system has flung itself into a “cytokine storm” — an overdrive of such intensity that it is no longer fighting just the viral infection but the body’s own cells as well. White blood cells storm your lungs, destroying tissue. Fluid fills the tiny alveolar sacs that normally let the blood absorb oxygen. Effectively, you’re drowning, even with the ventilator pumping oxygen-enriched air into your lungs.
That’s not the worst of it. The intensity of the immune response is such that under its onslaught, organs throughout the body are shutting down, a process known as multiple-organ-dysfunction syndrome, or MODS. When your liver fails, it is unable to process toxins out of your blood, so your doctors rush to hook you up to a round-the-clock dialysis machine. Starved of oxygen, your brain cells begin to expire.
You’re fluttering on the edge between life and death. Now that you’ve slipped into MODS, your odds are 50-50 or worse. Owing to the fact that the pandemic has stretched the hospital’s resources past the breaking point, your outlook is even bleaker.
Lying on your cot, you half-hear as the doctors hook you up to an extracorporeal-membrane-oxygenation (ECMO) machine. This will take over the work of your heart and lungs and hopefully keep you alive until your body can find its way back to equilibrium.
And then, you are flooded with an overwhelming sense of calm. You sense that you have reached the nadir of your struggle. The worst of the danger is over. With the viral attack beaten, your body’s immune system will pull back, and you’ll begin the slow, painstaking journey to full recovery. Some weeks from now, the doctors will remove the tube from your throat and wheel away the ventilator. Your appetite will come back, and the color will return to your cheeks, and on a summer morning you’ll step out into the fresh air and hail a cab for home. And later still, you’ll meet the girl who will become your wife, and you’ll have three children, two of whom will have children of their own, who will visit you in your nursing home outside Tampa.
That’s what your mind is telling itself, anyway, as the last cells of your cerebral cortex burst in starburst waves, like the glowing algae in a midnight lagoon. In the isolation ward, your EKG goes to a steady tone. The doctors take away the ventilator and give it to a patient who arrived this morning. In the official records of the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ll be recorded as victim No. 592.
Article URL - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/03/the-story-of-a-coronavirus-infection.html
How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It)
By Jeff Wise
Photo: Dr. F.A. Murphy/Getty Images/Visuals Unlimited
You call a friend and arrange to meet for lunch. It’s unseasonably springlike, so you choose a place with outdoor seating, which seems like it should be safer. As usual, you take all reasonable precautions: You use hand sanitizer, sit a good distance from other customers, and try to avoid touching your face, though that last part is hard. A part of you suspects that this whole thing might be overblown.
What you don’t know is that ten days ago, your friend’s father was a guest of his business partner at the University Club, where he caught the novel coronavirus from the wife of a cryptocurrency speculator. Three days after that, he coughed into his hand before opening the door of his apartment to welcome his son home. The saliva of COVID-19 patients can harbor half a trillion virus particles per teaspoon, and a cough aerosolizes it into a diffuse mist. As your friend walked through the door he took a breath and 32,456 virus particles settled onto the lining of his mouth and throat.
Viruses have been multiplying inside his body ever since. And as he talks, the passage of his breath over the moist lining of his upper throat creates tiny droplets of virus-laden mucus that waft invisibly into the air over your table. Some settle on the as-yet-uneaten food on your plate, some drift onto your fingers, others are drawn into your nasal sinus or settle into your throat. By the time you extend your hand to shake good-bye, your body is carrying 43,654 virus particles. By the time you’re done shaking hands, that number is up to 312,405.
One of the droplets gets drawn into the branching passages of your lungs and settles on the warm, wet surface, depositing virus particles into the mucus coating the tissue. Each particle is round and very small; if you magnified a human hair so that it was as wide as a football field, the virus particle would be four inches across. The outer membrane of the virus consists of an oily layer embedded with jagged protein molecules called spike proteins. These stick out like the protrusions on a knobby ball chew toy. In the middle of the virus particle is a coiled strand of RNA, the virus’s genetic material. The payload.
As the virus drifts through the lung’s mucus, it bumps into one of the cells that line the surface. The cell is considerably larger than the virus; on the football-field scale, it’s 26 feet across. A billion years of evolution have equipped it to resist attackers. But it also has a vulnerability — a backdoor. Protruding from its surface is a chunk of protein called angiotensin converting enzyme 2, or ACE2 receptor. Normally, this molecule plays a role in modulating hormone activity within the body. Today, it’s going to serve as an anchor for the coronavirus.
As the spike protein bumps up against the surface of the lung cell, its shape matches that of the ACE2 so closely that it sticks to it like adhesive. The membrane of the virus then fuses with the membrane of the cell, spilling the RNA contents into the interior of the lung cell. The virus is in.
The viral RNA gets busy. The cell has its own genetic material, DNA, that produces copied fragments of itself in RNA form. These are continuously copied and sent into the main body of the cell, where they provide instructions for how to make the proteins that carry out all the functions of the cell. It’s like Santa’s workshop, where the elves, dutifully hammering out the toys on Santa’s instructions, are complexes of RNA and protein called ribosomes.
As soon as the viral RNA encounters a ribosome, that ribosome begins reading it and building viral proteins. These proteins then help the viral RNA to copy itself, and these copies then hijack more of the cell’s ribosomes. Other viral proteins block the cell from fighting back. Soon the cell’s normal business is completely overwhelmed by the demands of the viral RNA, as its energy and machinery are occupied with building the components of countless replica viruses.
As they are churned out, these components are transferred on a kind of cellular conveyor belt toward the surface of the cell. The virus membrane and spike proteins wrap around RNA strands, and a new particle is ready. These collect in internal bubbles, called vesicles, that move to the surface, burst open, and release new virus particles into your body by the tens and hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile, spike proteins that haven’t been incorporated into new viruses embed themselves directly into the host cell’s membrane so that it latches onto the surface of an adjacent cell, like a pirate ship lashing itself to a helpless merchantman. The two cells then fuse, and a whole host of viral RNA swarms over into the new host cell.
All up and down your lungs, throat, and mouth, the scene is repeated over and over as cell after cell is penetrated and hijacked. Assuming the virus behaves like its relative, SARS, each generation of infection takes about a day and can multiply the virus a millionfold. The replicated viruses spill out into the mucus, invade the bloodstream, and pour through the digestive system.
You don’t feel any of this. In fact, you still feel totally fine. If you have any complaint at all, it’s boredom. You’ve been a dutiful citizen, staying at home to practice social distancing, and after two days of bingeing on the Fast & Furious franchise, you decide that your mental health is at risk if you don’t get outside.
You call up an ex, and she agrees to meet you for a walk along the river. You’re hoping that the end-of-the-world zeitgeist might kindle some afternoon recklessness, but the face mask she’s wearing kills the vibe. Also she tells you that she’s decided to move in with a guy she met at Landmark. You didn’t even know she was into Landmark. She gives you a warm hug as you say good-bye, and you tell her it was great to see her, but you leave feeling deflated. What she doesn’t know is that an hour before, you went to the bathroom and neglected to wash your hands afterward. The invisible fecal smear you leave on the arm of her jacket contains 893,405 virus particles. Forty-seven seconds after she gets home, she’ll hang up her coat and then scratch an itch at the base of her nose just before she washes her hands. In that moment, 9,404 viral particles will transfer to her face. In five days, an ambulance will take her to Mount Sinai.
Like a retail chain gobbled up by private equity, stripped for parts, and left to die, your infected cells spew out virus particles until they burn themselves out and expire. As fragments of disintegrated cells spread through your bloodstream, your immune system finally senses that something is wrong. White blood cells detect the fragments of dead cells and release chemicals called cytokines that serve as an alarm signal, activating other parts of the immune system to swing into action. When responding immune cells identify a cell that has become infected, they attack and destroy it. Within your body, a microscopic Battle of the Somme is raging with your immune system leveling its Big Berthas on both the enemy trenches and its own troops. As the carnage mounts, the body’s temperature rises and the infected area becomes inflamed.
Two days later, sitting down to lunch, you realize that the thought of eating makes you feel nauseated. You lie down and sleep for a few hours. When you wake up, you realize that you’ve only gotten worse. Your chest feels tight, and you’ve got a dry cough that just won’t quit. You wonder: Is this what it feels like? You rummage through your medicine cabinet in vain and ultimately find a thermometer in the back of your linen closet. You hold it under your tongue for a minute and then read the result: 102. ****, you think, and crawl back into bed. You tell yourself that it might just be the regular flu, and even if worse comes to worst, you’re young(-ish) and otherwise healthy. You’re not in the high-risk group.
You’re right, of course, in a sense. For most people infected with the coronavirus, that’s as far as it goes. With bed rest, they get better. But for reasons scientists don’t understand, about 20 percent of people get severely ill. Despite your relative youth, you’re one of them.
After four days of raging fever and feeling sore all over, you realize that you’re sicker than you’ve ever been in your life. You’ve got a dry cough that shakes you so hard that your back hurts. Fighting for breath, you order an Uber and head to the nearest emergency room. (You leave 376,345,090 virus particles smeared on various surfaces of the car and another 323,443,865 floating in aerosols in the air.)
At the ER, you’re examined and sent to an isolation ward. As doctors wait for the results of a test for the coronavirus, they administer a CT scan of your lungs, which reveals tell-tale “ground-glass opacities,” fuzzy spots caused by fluid accumulating where the immune-system battle is the most intense. Not only have you got COVID-19, but it’s led to a kind of intense and dangerous pneumonia called acute-respiratory-distress syndrome, or ARDS.
With all the regular beds already occupied by the many COVID-19 sufferers, you’re given a cot in a room alongside five other patients. Doctors put you on an intravenous drip to supply your body with nutrients and fluids as well as antiviral medicine. Within a day of your arrival, your condition deteriorates. You throw up for several days and start to hallucinate. Your heart rate slows to 50 beats a minute. When a patient in the next room dies, doctors take the ventilator he was using and put you on it. By the time the nurse threads the endotracheal tube down your throat, you’re only half-conscious of the sensation of it snaking deeper and deeper toward your lungs. You just lie there as she places tape over your mouth to keep the tube in place.
You’re crashing. Your immune system has flung itself into a “cytokine storm” — an overdrive of such intensity that it is no longer fighting just the viral infection but the body’s own cells as well. White blood cells storm your lungs, destroying tissue. Fluid fills the tiny alveolar sacs that normally let the blood absorb oxygen. Effectively, you’re drowning, even with the ventilator pumping oxygen-enriched air into your lungs.
That’s not the worst of it. The intensity of the immune response is such that under its onslaught, organs throughout the body are shutting down, a process known as multiple-organ-dysfunction syndrome, or MODS. When your liver fails, it is unable to process toxins out of your blood, so your doctors rush to hook you up to a round-the-clock dialysis machine. Starved of oxygen, your brain cells begin to expire.
You’re fluttering on the edge between life and death. Now that you’ve slipped into MODS, your odds are 50-50 or worse. Owing to the fact that the pandemic has stretched the hospital’s resources past the breaking point, your outlook is even bleaker.
Lying on your cot, you half-hear as the doctors hook you up to an extracorporeal-membrane-oxygenation (ECMO) machine. This will take over the work of your heart and lungs and hopefully keep you alive until your body can find its way back to equilibrium.
And then, you are flooded with an overwhelming sense of calm. You sense that you have reached the nadir of your struggle. The worst of the danger is over. With the viral attack beaten, your body’s immune system will pull back, and you’ll begin the slow, painstaking journey to full recovery. Some weeks from now, the doctors will remove the tube from your throat and wheel away the ventilator. Your appetite will come back, and the color will return to your cheeks, and on a summer morning you’ll step out into the fresh air and hail a cab for home. And later still, you’ll meet the girl who will become your wife, and you’ll have three children, two of whom will have children of their own, who will visit you in your nursing home outside Tampa.
That’s what your mind is telling itself, anyway, as the last cells of your cerebral cortex burst in starburst waves, like the glowing algae in a midnight lagoon. In the isolation ward, your EKG goes to a steady tone. The doctors take away the ventilator and give it to a patient who arrived this morning. In the official records of the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ll be recorded as victim No. 592.
Thank you @Silver . At this stage some people need some fear to start realising the situation we are in.
Article credit - NYmag.com
Article URL - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/03/the-story-of-a-coronavirus-infection.html
How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It)
By Jeff Wise
Photo: Dr. F.A. Murphy/Getty Images/Visuals Unlimited
You call a friend and arrange to meet for lunch. It’s unseasonably springlike, so you choose a place with outdoor seating, which seems like it should be safer. As usual, you take all reasonable precautions: You use hand sanitizer, sit a good distance from other customers, and try to avoid touching your face, though that last part is hard. A part of you suspects that this whole thing might be overblown.
What you don’t know is that ten days ago, your friend’s father was a guest of his business partner at the University Club, where he caught the novel coronavirus from the wife of a cryptocurrency speculator. Three days after that, he coughed into his hand before opening the door of his apartment to welcome his son home. The saliva of COVID-19 patients can harbor half a trillion virus particles per teaspoon, and a cough aerosolizes it into a diffuse mist. As your friend walked through the door he took a breath and 32,456 virus particles settled onto the lining of his mouth and throat.
Viruses have been multiplying inside his body ever since. And as he talks, the passage of his breath over the moist lining of his upper throat creates tiny droplets of virus-laden mucus that waft invisibly into the air over your table. Some settle on the as-yet-uneaten food on your plate, some drift onto your fingers, others are drawn into your nasal sinus or settle into your throat. By the time you extend your hand to shake good-bye, your body is carrying 43,654 virus particles. By the time you’re done shaking hands, that number is up to 312,405.
One of the droplets gets drawn into the branching passages of your lungs and settles on the warm, wet surface, depositing virus particles into the mucus coating the tissue. Each particle is round and very small; if you magnified a human hair so that it was as wide as a football field, the virus particle would be four inches across. The outer membrane of the virus consists of an oily layer embedded with jagged protein molecules called spike proteins. These stick out like the protrusions on a knobby ball chew toy. In the middle of the virus particle is a coiled strand of RNA, the virus’s genetic material. The payload.
As the virus drifts through the lung’s mucus, it bumps into one of the cells that line the surface. The cell is considerably larger than the virus; on the football-field scale, it’s 26 feet across. A billion years of evolution have equipped it to resist attackers. But it also has a vulnerability — a backdoor. Protruding from its surface is a chunk of protein called angiotensin converting enzyme 2, or ACE2 receptor. Normally, this molecule plays a role in modulating hormone activity within the body. Today, it’s going to serve as an anchor for the coronavirus.
As the spike protein bumps up against the surface of the lung cell, its shape matches that of the ACE2 so closely that it sticks to it like adhesive. The membrane of the virus then fuses with the membrane of the cell, spilling the RNA contents into the interior of the lung cell. The virus is in.
The viral RNA gets busy. The cell has its own genetic material, DNA, that produces copied fragments of itself in RNA form. These are continuously copied and sent into the main body of the cell, where they provide instructions for how to make the proteins that carry out all the functions of the cell. It’s like Santa’s workshop, where the elves, dutifully hammering out the toys on Santa’s instructions, are complexes of RNA and protein called ribosomes.
As soon as the viral RNA encounters a ribosome, that ribosome begins reading it and building viral proteins. These proteins then help the viral RNA to copy itself, and these copies then hijack more of the cell’s ribosomes. Other viral proteins block the cell from fighting back. Soon the cell’s normal business is completely overwhelmed by the demands of the viral RNA, as its energy and machinery are occupied with building the components of countless replica viruses.
As they are churned out, these components are transferred on a kind of cellular conveyor belt toward the surface of the cell. The virus membrane and spike proteins wrap around RNA strands, and a new particle is ready. These collect in internal bubbles, called vesicles, that move to the surface, burst open, and release new virus particles into your body by the tens and hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile, spike proteins that haven’t been incorporated into new viruses embed themselves directly into the host cell’s membrane so that it latches onto the surface of an adjacent cell, like a pirate ship lashing itself to a helpless merchantman. The two cells then fuse, and a whole host of viral RNA swarms over into the new host cell.
All up and down your lungs, throat, and mouth, the scene is repeated over and over as cell after cell is penetrated and hijacked. Assuming the virus behaves like its relative, SARS, each generation of infection takes about a day and can multiply the virus a millionfold. The replicated viruses spill out into the mucus, invade the bloodstream, and pour through the digestive system.
You don’t feel any of this. In fact, you still feel totally fine. If you have any complaint at all, it’s boredom. You’ve been a dutiful citizen, staying at home to practice social distancing, and after two days of bingeing on the Fast & Furious franchise, you decide that your mental health is at risk if you don’t get outside.
You call up an ex, and she agrees to meet you for a walk along the river. You’re hoping that the end-of-the-world zeitgeist might kindle some afternoon recklessness, but the face mask she’s wearing kills the vibe. Also she tells you that she’s decided to move in with a guy she met at Landmark. You didn’t even know she was into Landmark. She gives you a warm hug as you say good-bye, and you tell her it was great to see her, but you leave feeling deflated. What she doesn’t know is that an hour before, you went to the bathroom and neglected to wash your hands afterward. The invisible fecal smear you leave on the arm of her jacket contains 893,405 virus particles. Forty-seven seconds after she gets home, she’ll hang up her coat and then scratch an itch at the base of her nose just before she washes her hands. In that moment, 9,404 viral particles will transfer to her face. In five days, an ambulance will take her to Mount Sinai.
Like a retail chain gobbled up by private equity, stripped for parts, and left to die, your infected cells spew out virus particles until they burn themselves out and expire. As fragments of disintegrated cells spread through your bloodstream, your immune system finally senses that something is wrong. White blood cells detect the fragments of dead cells and release chemicals called cytokines that serve as an alarm signal, activating other parts of the immune system to swing into action. When responding immune cells identify a cell that has become infected, they attack and destroy it. Within your body, a microscopic Battle of the Somme is raging with your immune system leveling its Big Berthas on both the enemy trenches and its own troops. As the carnage mounts, the body’s temperature rises and the infected area becomes inflamed.
Two days later, sitting down to lunch, you realize that the thought of eating makes you feel nauseated. You lie down and sleep for a few hours. When you wake up, you realize that you’ve only gotten worse. Your chest feels tight, and you’ve got a dry cough that just won’t quit. You wonder: Is this what it feels like? You rummage through your medicine cabinet in vain and ultimately find a thermometer in the back of your linen closet. You hold it under your tongue for a minute and then read the result: 102. ****, you think, and crawl back into bed. You tell yourself that it might just be the regular flu, and even if worse comes to worst, you’re young(-ish) and otherwise healthy. You’re not in the high-risk group.
You’re right, of course, in a sense. For most people infected with the coronavirus, that’s as far as it goes. With bed rest, they get better. But for reasons scientists don’t understand, about 20 percent of people get severely ill. Despite your relative youth, you’re one of them.
After four days of raging fever and feeling sore all over, you realize that you’re sicker than you’ve ever been in your life. You’ve got a dry cough that shakes you so hard that your back hurts. Fighting for breath, you order an Uber and head to the nearest emergency room. (You leave 376,345,090 virus particles smeared on various surfaces of the car and another 323,443,865 floating in aerosols in the air.)
At the ER, you’re examined and sent to an isolation ward. As doctors wait for the results of a test for the coronavirus, they administer a CT scan of your lungs, which reveals tell-tale “ground-glass opacities,” fuzzy spots caused by fluid accumulating where the immune-system battle is the most intense. Not only have you got COVID-19, but it’s led to a kind of intense and dangerous pneumonia called acute-respiratory-distress syndrome, or ARDS.
With all the regular beds already occupied by the many COVID-19 sufferers, you’re given a cot in a room alongside five other patients. Doctors put you on an intravenous drip to supply your body with nutrients and fluids as well as antiviral medicine. Within a day of your arrival, your condition deteriorates. You throw up for several days and start to hallucinate. Your heart rate slows to 50 beats a minute. When a patient in the next room dies, doctors take the ventilator he was using and put you on it. By the time the nurse threads the endotracheal tube down your throat, you’re only half-conscious of the sensation of it snaking deeper and deeper toward your lungs. You just lie there as she places tape over your mouth to keep the tube in place.
You’re crashing. Your immune system has flung itself into a “cytokine storm” — an overdrive of such intensity that it is no longer fighting just the viral infection but the body’s own cells as well. White blood cells storm your lungs, destroying tissue. Fluid fills the tiny alveolar sacs that normally let the blood absorb oxygen. Effectively, you’re drowning, even with the ventilator pumping oxygen-enriched air into your lungs.
That’s not the worst of it. The intensity of the immune response is such that under its onslaught, organs throughout the body are shutting down, a process known as multiple-organ-dysfunction syndrome, or MODS. When your liver fails, it is unable to process toxins out of your blood, so your doctors rush to hook you up to a round-the-clock dialysis machine. Starved of oxygen, your brain cells begin to expire.
You’re fluttering on the edge between life and death. Now that you’ve slipped into MODS, your odds are 50-50 or worse. Owing to the fact that the pandemic has stretched the hospital’s resources past the breaking point, your outlook is even bleaker.
Lying on your cot, you half-hear as the doctors hook you up to an extracorporeal-membrane-oxygenation (ECMO) machine. This will take over the work of your heart and lungs and hopefully keep you alive until your body can find its way back to equilibrium.
And then, you are flooded with an overwhelming sense of calm. You sense that you have reached the nadir of your struggle. The worst of the danger is over. With the viral attack beaten, your body’s immune system will pull back, and you’ll begin the slow, painstaking journey to full recovery. Some weeks from now, the doctors will remove the tube from your throat and wheel away the ventilator. Your appetite will come back, and the color will return to your cheeks, and on a summer morning you’ll step out into the fresh air and hail a cab for home. And later still, you’ll meet the girl who will become your wife, and you’ll have three children, two of whom will have children of their own, who will visit you in your nursing home outside Tampa.
That’s what your mind is telling itself, anyway, as the last cells of your cerebral cortex burst in starburst waves, like the glowing algae in a midnight lagoon. In the isolation ward, your EKG goes to a steady tone. The doctors take away the ventilator and give it to a patient who arrived this morning. In the official records of the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ll be recorded as victim No. 592.
Eisch!
A small list of useful resources:
1. http://www.nicd.ac.za/
2. https://sacoronavirus.co.za/
3. https://www.mediclinic.co.za/en/corporate/corona-virus/covid-19-risk-assessment-tool.html
4. https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ao780VrDACpfZ3AdmUslCsuAF8Q?e=Z1aAUB
1. http://www.nicd.ac.za/
2. https://sacoronavirus.co.za/
3. https://www.mediclinic.co.za/en/corporate/corona-virus/covid-19-risk-assessment-tool.html
4. https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ao780VrDACpfZ3AdmUslCsuAF8Q?e=Z1aAUB
Last edited by a moderator:
That's ruined my Sunday and i have only been up 10 mins!
Hi all
Here’s a great article I read earlier. It’s an interview with an epidemiologist who helped fight against smallpox. This guy knows his stuff. What I appreciated about this is the clarity and the high level view.
It’s not all bad news and there is a bright side.
Well worth a read
Am going to paste it below:
Article credit - Wired.com
URL - https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-interview-larry-brilliant-smallpox-epidemiologist/
________________________________________________________________________________
The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming
Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need lots more testing.
PHOTOGRAPH: PAUL ZIMMERMAN/GETTY IMAGES
LARRY BRILLIANT SAYS he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to take seriously. “A billion people would get sick," he said. “As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their jobs and their health care benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable.”
Now the unthinkable is here, and Brilliant, the Chairman of the board of Ending Pandemics, is sharing expertise with those on the front lines. We are a long way from 100 million deaths due to the novel coronavirus, but it has turned our world upside down. Brilliant is trying not to say “I told you so” too often. But he did tell us so, not only in talks and writings, but as the senior technical advisor for the pandemic horror film Contagion, now a top streaming selection for the homebound. Besides working with the World Health Organization in the effort to end smallpox, Brilliant, who is now 75, has fought flu, polio, and blindness; once led Google’s nonprofit wing, Google.org; co-founded the conferencing system the Well; and has traveled with the Grateful Dead.
We talked by phone on Tuesday. At the time, President Donald Trump’s response to the crisis had started to change from “no worries at all” to finally taking more significant steps to stem the pandemic. Brilliant lives in one of the six Bay Area counties where residents were ordered to shelter in place. When we began the conversation, he’d just gotten off the phone with someone he described as high government official, who asked Brilliant “How the **** did we get here?” I wanted to hear how we’ll get out of here. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Steven Levy: I was in the room in 2006 when you gave that TED talk. Your wish was “Help Me Stop Pandemics.” You didn't get your wish, did you?
Larry Brilliant: No, I didn't get that wish at all, although the systems that I asked for have certainly been created and are being used. It's very funny because we did a movie, Contagion—
We're all watching that movie now.
People say Contagion is prescient. We just saw the science. The whole epidemiological community has been warning everybody for the past 10 or 15 years that it wasn't a question of whether we were going to have a pandemic like this. It was simply when. It's really hard to get people to listen. I mean, Trump pushed out the admiral on the National Security Council, who was the only person at that level who's responsible for pandemic defense. With him went his entire downline of employees and staff and relationships. And then Trump removed the [early warning] funding for countries around the world.
I've heard you talk about the significance that this is a “novel” virus.
It doesn't mean a fictitious virus. It’s not like a novel or a novella.
Too bad.
It means it's new. That there is no human being in the world that has immunity as a result of having had it before. That means it’s capable of infecting 7.8 billion of our brothers and sisters.
Since it's novel, we’re still learning about it. Do you believe that if someone gets it and recovers, that person thereafter has immunity?
So I don't see anything in this virus, even though it's novel, [that contradicts that]. There are cases where people think that they've gotten it again, [but] that's more likely to be a test failure than it is an actual reinfection. But there's going to be tens of millions of us or hundreds of millions of us or more who will get this virus before it's all over, and with large numbers like that, almost anything where you ask “Does this happen?” can happen. That doesn't mean that it is of public health or epidemiological importance.
Is this the worst outbreak you’ve ever seen?
It's the most dangerous pandemic in our lifetime.
We are being asked to do things, certainly, that never happened in my lifetime—stay in the house, stay 6 feet away from other people, don’t go to group gatherings. Are we getting the right advice?
Well, as you reach me, I'm pretending that I'm in a meditation retreat, but I'm actually being semi-quarantined in Marin County. Yes, this is very good advice. But did we get good advice from the president of the United States for the first 12 weeks? No. All we got were lies. Saying it’s fake, by saying this is a Democratic hoax. There are still people today who believe that, to their detriment. Speaking as a public health person, this is the most irresponsible act of an elected official that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime. But what you're hearing now [to self-isolate, close schools, cancel events] is right. Is it going to protect us completely? Is it going to make the world safe forever? No. It's a great thing because we want to spread out the disease over time.
Flatten the curve.
By slowing it down or flattening it, we're not going to decrease the total number of cases, we're going to postpone many cases, until we get a vaccine—which we will, because there's nothing in the virology that makes me frightened that we won’t get a vaccine in 12 to 18 months. Eventually, we will get to the epidemiologist gold ring.
What’s that?
That means, A, a large enough quantity of us have caught the disease and become immune. And B, we have a vaccine. The combination of A plus B is enough to create herd immunity, which is around 70 or 80 percent.
I hold out hope that we get an antiviral for Covid-19 that is curative, but in addition is prophylactic. It's certainly unproven and it's certainly controversial, and certainly a lot of people are not going to agree with me. But I offer as evidence two papers in 2005, one in Nature and one in Science. They both did mathematical modeling with influenza, to see whether saturation with just Tamiflu of an area around a case of influenza could stop the outbreak. And in both cases, it worked. I also offer as evidence the fact that at one point we thought HIV/AIDS was incurable and a death sentence. Then, some wonderful scientists discovered antiviral drugs, and we've learned that some of those drugs can be given prior to exposure and prevent the disease. Because of the intense interest in getting [Covid-19] conquered, we will put the scientific clout and money and resources behind finding antivirals that have prophylactic or preventive characteristics that can be used in addition to [vaccines].
When will we be able to leave the house and go back to work?
I have a very good retrospect-oscope, but what's needed right now as a prospecto-scope. If this were a tennis match, I would say advantage virus right now. But there's really good news from South Korea—they had less than 100 cases today. China had more cases imported than it had from continuous transmission from Wuhan today. The Chinese model will be very hard for us to follow. We're not going to be locking people up in their apartments, boarding them up. But the South Korea model is one that we could follow. Unfortunately, it requires doing the proportionate number of tests that they did—they did well over a quarter of a million tests. In fact, by the time South Korea had done 200,000 tests, we had probably done less than 1,000.
Now that we've missed the opportunity for early testing, is it too late for testing to make a difference?
Absolutely not. Tests would make a measurable difference. We should be doing a stochastic process random probability sample of the country to find out where the hell the virus really is. Because we don't know. Maybe Mississippi is reporting no cases because it's not looking. How would they know? Zimbabwe reports zero cases because they don't have testing capability, not because they don't have the virus. We need something that looks like a home pregnancy test, that you can do at home.
If you were the president for one day, what would you say in the daily briefing?
I would begin the press conference by saying "Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Ron Klain—he was the Ebola czar [under President Barack Obama], and now I’ve called him back and made him Covid czar. Everything will be centralized under one person who has the respect of both the public health community and the political community." We're a divided country right now. Right now, Tony Fauci [head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] is the closest that we come to that.
Are you scared?
I'm in the age group that has a one in seven mortality rate if I get it. If you're not worried, you're not paying attention. But I'm not scared. I firmly believe that the steps that we're taking will extend the time that it takes for the virus to make the rounds. I think that, in turn, will increase the likelihood that we will have a vaccine or we will have a prophylactic antiviral in time to cut off, reduce, or truncate the spread. Everybody needs to remember: This is not a zombie apocalypse. It's not a mass extinction event.
Should we be wearing masks?
The N95 mask itself is extremely wonderful. The pores in the mask are three microns wide. The virus is one micron wide. So you get people who say, well, it's not going to work. But you try having three big, huge football players who are rushing for lunch through a door at lunchtime—they're not going to get through. In the latest data I saw, the mask provided 5x protection. That's really good. But we have to keep the hospitals going and we have to keep the health professionals able to come to work and be safe. So masks should go where they’re needed the most: in taking care of patients.
How will we know when we’re through this?
The world is not going to begin to look normal until three things have happened. One, we figure out whether the distribution of this virus looks like an iceberg, which is one-seventh above the water, or a pyramid, where we see everything. If we're only seeing right now one-seventh of the actual disease because we're not testing enough, and we're just blind to it, then we're in a world of hurt. Two, we have a treatment that works, a vaccine or antiviral. And three, maybe most important, we begin to see large numbers of people—in particular nurses, home health care providers, doctors, policemen, firemen, and teachers who have had the disease—are immune, and we have tested them to know that they are not infectious any longer. And we have a system that identifies them, either a concert wristband or a card with their photograph and some kind of a stamp on it. Then we can be comfortable sending our children back to school, because we know the teacher is not infectious.
And instead of saying "No, you can't visit anybody in nursing home," we have a group of people who are certified that they work with elderly and vulnerable people, and nurses who can go back into the hospitals and dentists who can open your mouth and look in your mouth and not be giving you the virus. When those three things happen, that's when normalcy will return.
Is there in any way a brighter side to this?
Well, I'm a scientist, but I'm also a person of faith. And I can't ever look at something without asking the question of isn't there a higher power that in some way will help us to be the best version of ourselves that we could be? I thought we would see the equivalent of empty streets in the civic arena, but the amount of civic engagement is greater than I've ever seen. But I'm seeing young kids, millennials, who are volunteering to go take groceries to people who are homebound, elderly. I'm seeing an incredible influx of nurses, heroic nurses, who are coming and working many more hours than they worked before, doctors who fearlessly go into the hospital to work. I've never seen the kind of volunteerism I'm seeing.
I don't want to pretend that this is an exercise worth going through in order to get to that state. This is a really unprecedented and difficult time that will test us. When we do get through it, maybe like the Second World War, it will cause us to reexamine what has caused the fractional division we have in this country. The virus is an equal opportunity infector. And it’s probably the way we would be better if we saw ourselves that way, which is much more alike than different.
WIRED is providing unlimited free access to stories about the coronavirus pandemic. Sign up for our Coronavirus Update to get the latest in your inbox.
Here’s a great article I read earlier. It’s an interview with an epidemiologist who helped fight against smallpox. This guy knows his stuff. What I appreciated about this is the clarity and the high level view.
It’s not all bad news and there is a bright side.
Well worth a read
Am going to paste it below:
Article credit - Wired.com
URL - https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-interview-larry-brilliant-smallpox-epidemiologist/
________________________________________________________________________________
The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming
Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need lots more testing.
PHOTOGRAPH: PAUL ZIMMERMAN/GETTY IMAGES
LARRY BRILLIANT SAYS he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to take seriously. “A billion people would get sick," he said. “As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their jobs and their health care benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable.”
Now the unthinkable is here, and Brilliant, the Chairman of the board of Ending Pandemics, is sharing expertise with those on the front lines. We are a long way from 100 million deaths due to the novel coronavirus, but it has turned our world upside down. Brilliant is trying not to say “I told you so” too often. But he did tell us so, not only in talks and writings, but as the senior technical advisor for the pandemic horror film Contagion, now a top streaming selection for the homebound. Besides working with the World Health Organization in the effort to end smallpox, Brilliant, who is now 75, has fought flu, polio, and blindness; once led Google’s nonprofit wing, Google.org; co-founded the conferencing system the Well; and has traveled with the Grateful Dead.
We talked by phone on Tuesday. At the time, President Donald Trump’s response to the crisis had started to change from “no worries at all” to finally taking more significant steps to stem the pandemic. Brilliant lives in one of the six Bay Area counties where residents were ordered to shelter in place. When we began the conversation, he’d just gotten off the phone with someone he described as high government official, who asked Brilliant “How the **** did we get here?” I wanted to hear how we’ll get out of here. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Steven Levy: I was in the room in 2006 when you gave that TED talk. Your wish was “Help Me Stop Pandemics.” You didn't get your wish, did you?
Larry Brilliant: No, I didn't get that wish at all, although the systems that I asked for have certainly been created and are being used. It's very funny because we did a movie, Contagion—
We're all watching that movie now.
People say Contagion is prescient. We just saw the science. The whole epidemiological community has been warning everybody for the past 10 or 15 years that it wasn't a question of whether we were going to have a pandemic like this. It was simply when. It's really hard to get people to listen. I mean, Trump pushed out the admiral on the National Security Council, who was the only person at that level who's responsible for pandemic defense. With him went his entire downline of employees and staff and relationships. And then Trump removed the [early warning] funding for countries around the world.
I've heard you talk about the significance that this is a “novel” virus.
It doesn't mean a fictitious virus. It’s not like a novel or a novella.
Too bad.
It means it's new. That there is no human being in the world that has immunity as a result of having had it before. That means it’s capable of infecting 7.8 billion of our brothers and sisters.
Since it's novel, we’re still learning about it. Do you believe that if someone gets it and recovers, that person thereafter has immunity?
So I don't see anything in this virus, even though it's novel, [that contradicts that]. There are cases where people think that they've gotten it again, [but] that's more likely to be a test failure than it is an actual reinfection. But there's going to be tens of millions of us or hundreds of millions of us or more who will get this virus before it's all over, and with large numbers like that, almost anything where you ask “Does this happen?” can happen. That doesn't mean that it is of public health or epidemiological importance.
Is this the worst outbreak you’ve ever seen?
It's the most dangerous pandemic in our lifetime.
We are being asked to do things, certainly, that never happened in my lifetime—stay in the house, stay 6 feet away from other people, don’t go to group gatherings. Are we getting the right advice?
Well, as you reach me, I'm pretending that I'm in a meditation retreat, but I'm actually being semi-quarantined in Marin County. Yes, this is very good advice. But did we get good advice from the president of the United States for the first 12 weeks? No. All we got were lies. Saying it’s fake, by saying this is a Democratic hoax. There are still people today who believe that, to their detriment. Speaking as a public health person, this is the most irresponsible act of an elected official that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime. But what you're hearing now [to self-isolate, close schools, cancel events] is right. Is it going to protect us completely? Is it going to make the world safe forever? No. It's a great thing because we want to spread out the disease over time.
Flatten the curve.
By slowing it down or flattening it, we're not going to decrease the total number of cases, we're going to postpone many cases, until we get a vaccine—which we will, because there's nothing in the virology that makes me frightened that we won’t get a vaccine in 12 to 18 months. Eventually, we will get to the epidemiologist gold ring.
What’s that?
That means, A, a large enough quantity of us have caught the disease and become immune. And B, we have a vaccine. The combination of A plus B is enough to create herd immunity, which is around 70 or 80 percent.
I hold out hope that we get an antiviral for Covid-19 that is curative, but in addition is prophylactic. It's certainly unproven and it's certainly controversial, and certainly a lot of people are not going to agree with me. But I offer as evidence two papers in 2005, one in Nature and one in Science. They both did mathematical modeling with influenza, to see whether saturation with just Tamiflu of an area around a case of influenza could stop the outbreak. And in both cases, it worked. I also offer as evidence the fact that at one point we thought HIV/AIDS was incurable and a death sentence. Then, some wonderful scientists discovered antiviral drugs, and we've learned that some of those drugs can be given prior to exposure and prevent the disease. Because of the intense interest in getting [Covid-19] conquered, we will put the scientific clout and money and resources behind finding antivirals that have prophylactic or preventive characteristics that can be used in addition to [vaccines].
When will we be able to leave the house and go back to work?
I have a very good retrospect-oscope, but what's needed right now as a prospecto-scope. If this were a tennis match, I would say advantage virus right now. But there's really good news from South Korea—they had less than 100 cases today. China had more cases imported than it had from continuous transmission from Wuhan today. The Chinese model will be very hard for us to follow. We're not going to be locking people up in their apartments, boarding them up. But the South Korea model is one that we could follow. Unfortunately, it requires doing the proportionate number of tests that they did—they did well over a quarter of a million tests. In fact, by the time South Korea had done 200,000 tests, we had probably done less than 1,000.
Now that we've missed the opportunity for early testing, is it too late for testing to make a difference?
Absolutely not. Tests would make a measurable difference. We should be doing a stochastic process random probability sample of the country to find out where the hell the virus really is. Because we don't know. Maybe Mississippi is reporting no cases because it's not looking. How would they know? Zimbabwe reports zero cases because they don't have testing capability, not because they don't have the virus. We need something that looks like a home pregnancy test, that you can do at home.
If you were the president for one day, what would you say in the daily briefing?
I would begin the press conference by saying "Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Ron Klain—he was the Ebola czar [under President Barack Obama], and now I’ve called him back and made him Covid czar. Everything will be centralized under one person who has the respect of both the public health community and the political community." We're a divided country right now. Right now, Tony Fauci [head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] is the closest that we come to that.
Are you scared?
I'm in the age group that has a one in seven mortality rate if I get it. If you're not worried, you're not paying attention. But I'm not scared. I firmly believe that the steps that we're taking will extend the time that it takes for the virus to make the rounds. I think that, in turn, will increase the likelihood that we will have a vaccine or we will have a prophylactic antiviral in time to cut off, reduce, or truncate the spread. Everybody needs to remember: This is not a zombie apocalypse. It's not a mass extinction event.
Should we be wearing masks?
The N95 mask itself is extremely wonderful. The pores in the mask are three microns wide. The virus is one micron wide. So you get people who say, well, it's not going to work. But you try having three big, huge football players who are rushing for lunch through a door at lunchtime—they're not going to get through. In the latest data I saw, the mask provided 5x protection. That's really good. But we have to keep the hospitals going and we have to keep the health professionals able to come to work and be safe. So masks should go where they’re needed the most: in taking care of patients.
How will we know when we’re through this?
The world is not going to begin to look normal until three things have happened. One, we figure out whether the distribution of this virus looks like an iceberg, which is one-seventh above the water, or a pyramid, where we see everything. If we're only seeing right now one-seventh of the actual disease because we're not testing enough, and we're just blind to it, then we're in a world of hurt. Two, we have a treatment that works, a vaccine or antiviral. And three, maybe most important, we begin to see large numbers of people—in particular nurses, home health care providers, doctors, policemen, firemen, and teachers who have had the disease—are immune, and we have tested them to know that they are not infectious any longer. And we have a system that identifies them, either a concert wristband or a card with their photograph and some kind of a stamp on it. Then we can be comfortable sending our children back to school, because we know the teacher is not infectious.
And instead of saying "No, you can't visit anybody in nursing home," we have a group of people who are certified that they work with elderly and vulnerable people, and nurses who can go back into the hospitals and dentists who can open your mouth and look in your mouth and not be giving you the virus. When those three things happen, that's when normalcy will return.
Is there in any way a brighter side to this?
Well, I'm a scientist, but I'm also a person of faith. And I can't ever look at something without asking the question of isn't there a higher power that in some way will help us to be the best version of ourselves that we could be? I thought we would see the equivalent of empty streets in the civic arena, but the amount of civic engagement is greater than I've ever seen. But I'm seeing young kids, millennials, who are volunteering to go take groceries to people who are homebound, elderly. I'm seeing an incredible influx of nurses, heroic nurses, who are coming and working many more hours than they worked before, doctors who fearlessly go into the hospital to work. I've never seen the kind of volunteerism I'm seeing.
I don't want to pretend that this is an exercise worth going through in order to get to that state. This is a really unprecedented and difficult time that will test us. When we do get through it, maybe like the Second World War, it will cause us to reexamine what has caused the fractional division we have in this country. The virus is an equal opportunity infector. And it’s probably the way we would be better if we saw ourselves that way, which is much more alike than different.
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Kan nie eers hulle eie gatte ''defend'' nie maar wil Covid keer !
South African military forces may be deployed to patrol the streets in a bid to stop the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. This is according to a report in the Sunday Times.
The report stated that if there is a spike in coronavirus infections in the country, the army’s deployment would delay the need for a national lockdown.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize told the Sunday Times that “if current restrictions do not limit the virus’s spread, the army will soon be patrolling the streets to enforce them”.
South African military forces may be deployed to patrol the streets in a bid to stop the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. This is according to a report in the Sunday Times.
The report stated that if there is a spike in coronavirus infections in the country, the army’s deployment would delay the need for a national lockdown.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize told the Sunday Times that “if current restrictions do not limit the virus’s spread, the army will soon be patrolling the streets to enforce them”.
An old notice from Potch during the 1918 Spanish flu
The advertisement requesting help was published on 15 October 1918 in the Potchefstroom Herald.
The advertisement requesting help was published on 15 October 1918 in the Potchefstroom Herald.
Capetonians good news for @Hooked, @Resistance and co.
Oranjezicht City Farm --- information and orders, email market@ozcf.co.za.
The Market is closed but online veggies are sprouting.
If you are looking to have a grocery shopping experience that doesn’t feel apocalyptic and leave you scratching your head wondering what your fellow Capetonians plan to do with all that toilet paper, you can continue to support your local farmers via our online fruit and veg box offering.
Our farmers have loads of produce that they are continuing to harvest. So, from next week onwards, we will have a limited selection of veg and fruit boxes available to purchase online for drive-through collection at the market at specific times. Our packing team will be taking all the hygiene protocols to stay safe themselves. We have also taken the advice of event safety consultants and will be working with them over the next period to ensure the implementation of additional safety measures and stringent cleaning and disinfecting procedures, whilst receiving stock from farmers and packing these into boxes.
Oranjezicht City Farm --- information and orders, email market@ozcf.co.za.
The Market is closed but online veggies are sprouting.
If you are looking to have a grocery shopping experience that doesn’t feel apocalyptic and leave you scratching your head wondering what your fellow Capetonians plan to do with all that toilet paper, you can continue to support your local farmers via our online fruit and veg box offering.
Our farmers have loads of produce that they are continuing to harvest. So, from next week onwards, we will have a limited selection of veg and fruit boxes available to purchase online for drive-through collection at the market at specific times. Our packing team will be taking all the hygiene protocols to stay safe themselves. We have also taken the advice of event safety consultants and will be working with them over the next period to ensure the implementation of additional safety measures and stringent cleaning and disinfecting procedures, whilst receiving stock from farmers and packing these into boxes.
I co-agree
I don't want to make this sound like I'm attacking you or anybody else. I have seen a lot of posts on fb and comments made about authorities. So I feel this needs to be said.
There's no doubt there are shortcomings in our military, hospitals and government. Nobody can argue against that. But this is not the time to be cynical. Before this is over you might have to rely on them.
This is the situation we are in and its card we are dealt. Nothing we can do about that.
Instead start looking how you can be part of the solution. If you can sew, start making facemasks to donate to healthworkers. If you are more technical skilled start researching homemade ventilators. Those will run out. And its not a matter of you might save a life. You WILL save a life.
PS: Thank the heavens we don't have Zuma anymore.
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