More virus blather
Anyone who’s following the coronavirus (and I assume it’s most of you) has seen this map. It’s updated once or twice a day with the most orthodox numbers. I’m putting it here so I have a handy bookmark. Most people probably don’t go upstream to find it’s put out by Johns Hopkins. They write more about the details of what they’re tracking here.
So far, I’m heartened by the fact that cases outside mainland China haven’t exploded yet. My chances of surviving a lung bug this year are not awesome.
That’s an odd thing, too. This chest bug I caught; we’ve talked to people all over Britain who clearly have the same lurgie. It’s starts like a normal cold, but a nasty, productive cough lingers for months. Mined turned very ugly; more like a mild pneumonia, really. It’s not hard to imagine this thing carrying off someone otherwise weakened.
Clearly it’s not a normal cold. I wonder what the public health threshold is, that makes the authorities take notice, take samples and identify this particular bug as a thing with a name and a history?
When I was a teenager in rural Tennessee, a bunch of us came down with a bad one. By ‘us’ I mean teenagers — I don’t think any other age group was affected. So the medical establishment decided it was mononucleosis. Because teenagers.
Not a single one of us tested positive for mono — and I suspect most of us were tested, because it was a long one. In my case, it started with painful sores inside my mouth. To this day, I sometimes have a flare-up of mouth sores when my immune system is low.
Why didn’t they try to identify it for real? I guess because there was only one death (if I recall correctly, a fifteen year old girl who fell asleep on the couch and never woke up).
Sometimes I think an illness has to be some scientist’s pet bug to get any attention.
Posted: January 28th, 2020 under medicine.
Comments: 7
Comments
Comment from weasel again
Time: January 28, 2020, 10:21 pm
If I’m not much mistook, Johns Hopkins is where they did the coronavirus outbreak simulation three months ago that has everyone’s conspiracy lobes tingling.
Yeah, here it is. Event 201.
Comment from QuasiModo
Time: January 28, 2020, 11:18 pm
Times like this, they should shut down the entire airline industry globally…just military jets for CDC type people until they get a handle on it.
Nobody really NEEDS to fly.
Comment from DurnedYankee
Time: January 29, 2020, 12:27 am
@Quasimodo – Nobody needs to fly.
Well, Greta Skoldilocks would agree with you, but for different reasons.
Won’t happen though, people would be angry, can’t have that.
Stuff we SHOULD get angry about, like Epstein – with him conveniently dying in custody, and Prince Andrew seeming to be the ONLY famous person he ever had visit him – nah, some major organized high level evil going on there, both with Epstein’s life style in the first place, and then the obvious murder and cover up, but no.
Sigh. Go ahead make it look like the vacation isn’t going to happen, or be asked to be reasonable and endure a quarantine because you might infect your friends, neighbors, and entire town, well BAM!
OMG! Human rights violation! Help Help I’m being repressed!
No justice no peace!
Comment from Some Vegetable
Time: January 29, 2020, 1:29 am
China seems to report sporadically, however as of 6 pm EST 28 Jan 20 we are up to 5,578 confirmed cases, a jump of some 900 from yesterday, and some 131 deaths.
An interesting note – of the 7 cases in Japan, one is a bus driver whose only contact with China is that he had some Chinese tourists on his bus about two weeks ago.
Yeah, I have a sadly morbid curiosity about this. My prediction:
I have no idea….
Comment from Durnedyankee
Time: January 29, 2020, 1:42 pm
If I had an ounce of faith in the media on this it would help.
But we’re the villagers in the story of the little boy who cried wolf these days.
This is way better for them than screaming the earth is going to get hit by an extinction asteroid in the headline and having to explain in the 4th paragraph it happens every 4 billion years or so.
Comment from Drew458
Time: January 30, 2020, 3:53 am
People are telling me that I’m fixated on this Wuhan thing and am overreacting. I’m trying to accept that they’re probably right; the media does the Flu Scare thing every winter.
However, I’ve never seen this kind of reaction all around the world over any illness outbreak ever. Maybe the whole planet has wised up to the fact that China lies about everything, and if they’re quarantining 60+ million of their own people then maybe the rest of us should start freaking out.
I so much want this to be the annual flu hoax, and I’ll feel foolish and be out the minor cost of a couple face masks and some germicidal wipes. So until the bodies REALLY start piling up in the streets of the free world, I’ll find something else to blog about …other than the impeachment thing, which is just as disturbing, as never ending, and as emotionally sickening.
Comment from Tom
Time: January 30, 2020, 10:19 am
I think your idea is half of it, the other half would be that human’s are complicated beasts and there’s a lot that can go wrong at any one time. Thank God, it doesn’t, mostly, for most of us.
It also takes time and money to do the kind of research required and if there aren’t a lot of corpses piling up then both of those finite items will be used elsewhere.
On the pet project aspect…
My sister-in-law and her partner have a severely disabled 9 year-old son. Once it was obvious there was something wrong the testing began, not for a cure as it’s genetic, but to find the best treatment pathway, and also to learn what to expect. After lots of genetic testing, including some rather embarrassing, “Are you sure you’re not related?” types, it was discovered the poor lad had nothing currently known.
Until about a week ago, when a scientist somewhere who’d discovered an anomaly found this boy’s DNA in a research database. I don’t yet know what the syndrome is, my wife hasn’t been able to have a good chat with her sister yet, but we know that whatever it is, he’s one of only sixteen people in the world to have it. So far, how many may have been fobbed off with, “It’s cerebral palsy” and left it at that without pushing for further tests, as they did, we’ll never know.
We’re complicated.
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