Bleeding Edge

The special engineered characteristics of this Wuhan novel coronavirus are what is causing the pandemic, and not just the dismal failure of any one governments’ tardiness to reveal to the world the extent of the problem they are facing.

So no need to blame anyone, because the spread of this illness is purely due to the extreme viral characteristics of this new infectious disease, and not the lack of timely effort to curtail its infectious spread or the rate of infections — except we can blame the vast lag-time between the first cases found, and the governmental reaction to it…

And here are seven well known Hyperbolic Facts, about this new SARS like epidemic, aptly named, the Wuhan Novel Corona Virus, or rather COVID-19 that has already killed more than thrice the number of the old SARS epidemic, after which it has been scientifically named as the Pandemic of the Century if not the Millennium — SARS-CoV-2:

1) R0 ~2-6.6%
2) Severe cases 15-20%
3) CFR 0.5-2.2%
4) Asymptomatic spread & Silent Transmission of Infection
5) Incubation periods of 0-28 days
6) Attack rate of between 30-70% based on proximity and geography
7) Transmission mechanism is similar to influenza (respiratory) fomites, oral swabs, oral kisses, sputum, sperm, body fluids exchange, touch, fecal matter, etc.

The new coronavirus (known technically as SARS-CoV-2) that has been spreading around the world can cause a respiratory illness that can be severe. The disease (known as COVID-19) seems to have a fatality rate of less than 2 percent—exponentially lower than most outbreaks that make global news. The virus has raised alarm not despite that low fatality rate, but because of it.

Coronaviruses are similar to influenza viruses in that they are both single strands of RNA. Four coronaviruses commonly infect humans, causing colds. These are believed to have evolved in humans to maximize their own spread—which means sickening, but not killing, people. By contrast, the two prior novel coronavirus outbreaks—SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome, named for where the first outbreak occurred)—were picked up from animals, as was H5N1. These diseases were highly fatal to humans. If there were mild or asymptomatic cases, they were extremely few. Had there been more of them, the disease would have spread widely. Ultimately, SARS and MERS each killed fewer than 1,000 people.

This new virus, the COVID-19 has already killed more than twice that number.

It is scientifically named SARS-CoV-2 and is classed as far more serious pandemic killer than any of its predecessors…

Because with its potent mix of characteristics, and its signature evidence of bio-engineering, this virus is unlike most diseases that have captured the public’s popular attention — since it is deadly, but not too deadly.

This SARS-CoV-2 virus, yes — it makes people sick — but not too sick, and certainly not sick in any predictable, or uniquely identifiable way, but it sure as hell kills people…

Last week, 14 Americans tested positive on a cruise ship in Japan despite feeling fine, having weathered the rampant viral infection on that same ship., that has killed people and sickened many scores of others, and who are now housed in the Travis Air Force base in Fairfield of Northern California, awaiting transport to Southern California’s Orange County’s Costa Mesa sanatorium.

That event, proves not only that California is the nation’s epicenter of this Wuhan viral epidemic disease, but that this new virus may be the most dangerous infectious disease yet — because in many instances it causes no symptoms at all.

No symptoms at all and yet like Typhoid Mary, you can be as infected as a skunk is stinky and yet totally unaffected by its own smell…

And although the rest of the world — except China — has responded with unprecedented speed and mobilization of resources, all has come to nought.

Once the proverbial “Cat was out of the bag” and obviously the new virus was identified — its genome was sequenced in quick order and it was “Open Source” shared around the world within weeks.

Today, the WHO has been allowed into China, and thus the global scientific community has been able to share the genomic and clinical data at an unprecedented rate with a great deal of altruism and human interest.

And today, work on a new vaccine for this new virus — is well under way.

Lately, the Chinese government has enacted also all the dramatic containment measures, as the World Health Organization also declared a global emergency of international concern.

And it is worth noting, that all of this happened in a fraction of the time it took to even identify H5N1 back in 1997.

And yet the terrible outbreak continues to spread seemingly with the speed of light…

And here, on the link bellow, are the daily maps of the progress of infections from the Wuhan Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 as it courses along it’s path around the World and with the limited information coming out of China as well…

Global Cases Maps provided by Johns Hopkins University CSSE:

http://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY 101, states that “Containment” is the first step in responding to any outbreak.

Yet, in this instance this policy of containment hasn’t worked and apparently in the case of the Wuhan virus COVID-19, the possibility of preventing a pandemic seems to have played out in a matter of days.

Early days that is…

And those days are now long gone and far behind us.

Does the map above look like “Viral Containment” has been successful?

Because after hiding the seriousness of this new disease for a couple of months — they “woke up” in January,  and began the Communist party’s favorite game, of segregating the people to remove the viral ones and place them aways from the non-viral ones.

This tyrannical military policy of “Containment” masquerading as Public health policy, of cordoning off progressively larger and larger areas, radiating outwards from Wuhan City, and eventually encapsulating some 60 million people, and then growing to include more than double to 126 million people, and now to what amounts as a quarantine of 320 million people.

People are barred from leaving home, armed military police with big guns threatening to shoot people are the only ones roaming the streets, and even the constant buzz of drones flying surveillance overhead, along with military helicopters overseeing all the streets and dispatching armed troops to arrest those found outside, and even tracking the “truant citizens” by facial recognition cameras.

People in China’s quarantined states and provinces, are now going to jail — if they are caught outside their homes, even for a little while.

Nonetheless, regardless of all the extreme measures of Chinese containment — the virus has now been found in more than 39 countries.

Despite the apparent ineffectiveness of such measures — relative to their inordinate social and economic cost — the Chinese government’s crackdown, containment and citizen’s isolation continues to escalate, mainly because of the “Silent Transmission” effect of the “asymptomatic” and yet highly infectious people.

Today and obviously under tremendous “political pressure” from the top layers of the Communist Party of China to all officials of this totally “Top-Down” regime to “stop the virus at any cost” the Chinese government unleashed military police in protective biological warfare gear to start going door to door, and testing people for fevers and looking for signs of illness, and then sending all potential cases to quarantine camps, all over Hubei province and beyond, and not just in the City of Wuhan and its environs and villages as it was previously stated…

But apparently, this expanded tyrannical form of “Containment Policy” unleashed in order to slow down the Wuhan Coronavirus extreme infectious rate — instead it has helped the virus to spread to most all of China, and even to its most remote regions and territories, as well as in the countries that have many trade and tourism relations with China, like South Korea (reporting), Japan (reporting), some African countries (non-reporting), and even Italy (reporting), and Iran (reporting), along with many others to a total of 37 or 39 countries and rising as of the moment of this writing…

As a matter of fact if you had asked me earlier — I would have told you that this failure of Public Health Containment Policy, has been inevitable and this is a global pandemic as I have said to all of my friends and followers ever since the very beginning, and as I have also advised all of you to get tested.

Get tested not because you have symptoms but because you might be a silent transmitter as an asymptomatic carrier, and if you get tested, and identified as such, there is an obvious benefit to yourself, to your community, to our nation, and to the whole of humanity — in an increasing order of importance & gratitude.

Because we all know that just testing people who are already extremely sick is a highly  imperfect strategy if there are people out there who can spread the virus without a fever, chills, or without even feeling bad enough to stay home from work, let alone call the consulting nurse or the family GP doctor.

And yet through proper testing and identification — it is these very silent transmitters, the very asymptomatic people in our midst, that will help us track the disease, and for that we need plenty of testing of the general population, in order to identify those folks and help all of us learn the pathways of this most viral epidemic.

So, I kindly ask you to get tested, because by even the most conservative mathematical modeling studies of virological spread — within this coming year — some 40% to 70% of all people around the world will have been infected with the Wuhan virus that causes small death rate spikes, but as COVID-19 becomes the process of normalization, it will become the standard by which all other killing diseases will be measured against.

And yet, that fact does not mean that anyone of us, or even that all, or most of us will have any type of an episode, symptom, or even any type of severe illness due to this viral infection…

As a matter of fact the asymptomatic yet infectious people, will become the vast majority as antibodies and resistance and resilience to this viral epidemic becomes the new norm within the general population.

Gradually…

And it is even more likely that many of us, will have some mild or “milder” form of the disease, and many more will be truly asymptomatic, because same as it is with the influenza virus of today — which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions, and to those very young ones, and those of an older age — most cases will “come & pass” without any need to take medicines, visit the Doctor, or even seek serious medical care.

And even if this new virus observes the virological norms that are similar to today’s rates of infection by the seasonal “Cold & Flu” where overall around 14% of all people that are infected by influenza, have no symptoms — and yet are transmitting the disease to all others in their path… we are in for a real surprise of the numbers of infections that are fully asymptomatic.

Asymptomatic and yet fully infected and infectious people, carrying the Wuhan Coronavirus, are already out there — by the hundreds, if not thousands — as the news of today proves, because finally China reported the truth about the symptomatic carriers like “Typhoid Mary” spreading out the Wuhan Coronavirus willy-nilly throughout the world without themselves even registering the infection on a pneumonic CT-scan.

Therefore, we believe that this new virus will continue to spread surely, widely & globally — because the emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is the medical profession’s evolution to a “New Normal.”

And that “New Normal” is that of a new seasonal disease — an “endemic” coronavirus — that will supplant the annual “Influenza Season” with this far more lethal variant of a spreadable infectious viral disease.

And as with the other seasonal diseases — people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity, if this Wuhan virus follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “Cold & Flu season” could become “Cold, Flu and Wuhan Virus Season.”

“Cold, Flu and Wuhan Virus Season” will be of course far more lethal than what it is now — but that is expected by a global pandemic…

And at this point, the pandemic is out there and yet it is not even known how many people are infected worldwide, because countries are incentivized to hide these facts, and yet as of Sunday, there have been 35 confirmed cases in the US, according to the World Health Organization.

But CDC’s privileged estimates, based on multiple assumptions, is that upwards of a few dozen US citizens, and maybe up to 500 people have been infected and treated, or quarantined, or even asymptomatic, or some — may have recovered on their own or volition with minimal care…

And that’s all it would take to seed this viral disease widely, because the true rate of infection depends on how contagious the disease is in its milder form as seen in these iterative and generally lumped together as mild, “asymptomatic” and/or recovered cases.

Finally, this Friday, under the influence of the WHO team visiting and working now in China — the government approved Chinese military medical scientists, reported in the medical journal JAMA an apparent case (ONE 😉 ONLY ONE) instance of the asymptomatic spread of the virus, from a patient with a normal chest CT scan.

The researchers concluded, that if this finding is not a bizarre abnormality, “the prevention of COVID-19 infection would prove challenging.”

Yours,
Dr Churchill

PS:

Meanwhile the Chinese party conference and the Politburo meeting of the Chinese People’s Communist party has been scuppered…

Yet — still only “one” asymptomatic person in China is still the official Party line.

But in the Real World, where facts matter — you ought to know that you are quite likely to get infected by the Wuhan Novel Coronavirus, same as 2/3 of the global population.

And yet, do not worry about it, because most of these cases of Wuhan Coronavirus infections are not life-threatening…

And that fact, is what makes this Wuhan Novel Coronavirus epidemic a real pandemic.

And it also presents us with a perniciously difficult, & historical challenge, that is a real bitch to contain…