Well said, brief, to the point and point taken. It’s just a new variety of a common virus that is flu-like for most people, and just like other respiratory infectors, can cause severe or worse outcomes in some cases.
Also, keep fingers/hands away from eyes, nose, face. Maintain universally recognized, usual, customary and routine hand hygiene, too. Avoid unnecessary things that lower the immune system. Avoid infected people. Eat healthy by avoiding things that are recognized as not being health food.
Yeah that’s why China took massive measures, closing borders, stopping flights, extending holidays … costing billions to their economy. Because it’s just a flu.
What matters is the case fatality rate which is the number of people who die divided by the number who have the infection.
Right now that appears to be running about 2%, although honestly I think we have no idea what the real number is. First off, China is likely not being truthful about those numbers, but even if they are, odds are they really have no idea how many cases there are and how many deaths there are. They also don’t have the kind of medical resources to treat sick patients that a more developed nation would.
Until there is a significant outbreak in a first world country we won’t have a good estimate of the case fatality rate.
Let’s say that the real number is 2%. Let’s say that because this is a novel virus, and America is an immunologically naïeve population 1/5 of Americans contact the disease- 60 million people. That would mean 1.2 million deaths.
It’s like creating a supermodel. First you study very detailled what’s on the market.
Use every instrument available. Define your goal in a brainstorm session with your whole team.
After you come to a consensus, you take a host specimen of what comes closest to the goal.
Again, using the latest instruments, remove what you don’t like and replace with what you like.
Maybe in the future, we skip the host and donor and build straight from available building blocks.
The Australian scientists were able to get the virus to replicate itself in a cell culture using a a sample from a patient. He seemed to be implying it was a completely manufactured virus and that some lab managed to recreate it independently.
AFAIK the technology to truly create or change virii like that is a long way off, they can only inject some new RNA into existing ones (or maybe that was only bacteria/larger cells?)