Coronavirus crisis open thread - March

Is that from a source or your speculation? I don’t think we’re there yet. If there’s exponential growth over the next few days, then yes.

EDIT: Nevermind. I saw your reply to the other person.

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Long Shan has already banned incense. Bummer as a photographer…

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There were 2. The one in the photo was at Sanzhi - demolished about 10 years ago. The other was at Wanli, and some still survive.

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What did he say? Im not saying its a biological weapon. I can show you other experts who say otherwise. Do you know SARS escaped twice from a lab in Beijing

Back in December, the closest thing I had to a New Year’s resolution was an intention to spend less time following the news.

Oh well.

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Confirmed covid cases worldwide has passed 200,000. It took until March 6 to reach 100,000 and only another week and a half to double. And of course the real number is probably much, much higher.

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Yup - it’s important to remember that for many places like the United States, and I guess much of northern Europe, the tsunami is still out on the horizon. It hasn’t yet hit, but it’s coming. I read today - sorry, can’t remember where - that things are inevitably going to be getting much, much worse in the USA for at least three weeks, just because of latency and incubation times. What people are doing now is about improving things for April; what happens in March is pretty much inevitable.

Let’s just hope that we don’t get our own tsunami in Taiwan. I’m sure many of us have gone through the same switch: two months ago, friends and family were worried about me; now I’m terrified for them.

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What about all the people who aren’t office drones though? :thinking:

While I don’t take the news as positive - we doubled our cases in less than a week! - I do like the number of domestic, unknown source infections. Only 2/100 (as far as I remember - 1 of the recent 23, and 1 from a while ago) which is really not bad. The virus has been out in the wild for a while now, and still only 2 unknown cases! Worse than 0, to be sure, but I take this to mean that Taiwan’s measures are working, and all the border + quarantine stuff we just announced should be good too.

Interested to see how it looks 2-3 weeks from now… but then, I’ve been saying that since mid-January.

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“…I went on to serve on a group here in the United States that was basically the National Science Advisory Board of biosecurity safety issues so I’ve had a lot of experience in this area and so I bring that to the table and I tell you there is no evidence whatsoever that this is a bioweapon or that it was accidentally released from the Wuhan lab. Today with the genetics we have on these viruses and how we can do testing we can almost date them almost like carbon testing, you know, so radiocarbon you want to know how old a block is or something like that. This thing clearly jumped from an animal species, probably the third week in November to humans and pangolins, you know, the scaly anteater-like animals are a very good source because we have coronaviruses just like those in these animals and it got into a human. So you know, we’ve surely had a lot of challenges with that but I don’t believe that there’s any evidence linking this to an intentional release or an accidental release or that it’s an engineered bug.”

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Sure as hell tastes like it… :unamused:

I can’t speak for them. Personally my plan is to send everyone else in the Taipei office home and then I’ll have it all to myself. I’ll start wearing a kimono methinks.

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It seems to have been a matter of concern in the past:

David Cyranoski, “Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world’s most dangerous pathogens,” Nature, February 27, 2017

Edited to add:

The page linked above contains the following recently-added prefatory note:

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F

They shall be remembered.

Uh-oh…

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Goddammit. We’ve been culturally enriched by flying aids.

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People who were traveling earlier in the month to some destinations need to now self-quarantine:

To track those who have already entered Taiwan from high-risk areas, Chen also announced Wednesday that people in Taiwan who have been in or transited through Europe, Turkey, Egypt or Dubai between March 5 and 14 will be required to quarantine themselves at home for 14 days, effective immediately.

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At first I was WTF but, really, this is just sad. Considering what Iran has already been through. What is wrong with humans?

(I posted the tweet as the WSJ article is paywalled)

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North Korea is leading the way.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-16/north-korea-s-official-virus-tally-zero-experts-aren-t-so-sure