Coronavirus with an R0 of 3 or beyond

[Chris]

DT, funny you should write about that as I was thinking about this exact topic yesterday and before it too. Yet didn't write here as I didn't want to be sounding "alarmist". However when this virus commotion started, I saw a dream about one of the riders. The good thing is that I see premonitions extremely rarely, but when I do they are accurate. Not saying that my dream this time was one, but the timing was kinda spooky.

This should put your mind at ease...

A genuine photo of the convoy taking the first batch of UK coronavirus evacuees from Heathrow to the Quarantine site.



From wikipedia:

Pale Horse

The fourth Horseman, Death on the Pale Horse.
Engraving by Gustave Doré (1865).

When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.

— Revelation 6:7–8 NASB
The fourth and final Horseman is named Death. Known as "Θάνατος/Thanatos", of all the riders, he is the only one to whom the text itself explicitly gives a name. Unlike the other three, he is not described carrying a weapon or other object, instead he is followed by Hades (the resting place of the dead). However, illustrations commonly depict him carrying a scythe (like the Grim Reaper), sword,[30] or other implement.

The color of Death's horse is written as khlōros (χλωρός) in the original Koine Greek,[31] which can mean either green/greenish-yellow or pale/pallid.[32] The color is often translated as "pale", though "ashen", "pale green", and "yellowish green"[24] are other possible interpretations (the Greek word is the root of "chlorophyll" and "chlorine"). Based on uses of the word in ancient Greek medical literature, several scholars suggest that the color reflects the sickly pallor of a corpse.[3][33] In some modern artistic depictions, the horse is distinctly green.[34][35][36]

The Greek word for plague is θανάτῳ, which is a variation of Θάνατος, indicating a connection between the Fourth Horseman and plague.[37]

The verse beginning "they were given power over a fourth of the earth" is generally taken as referring to Death and Hades,[24][38] although some commentators see it as applying to all four horsemen.[1]

[Emil El Zapato]

Now that i'm focused on it: A quick search of articles provided me this insight.

The purportedly infected patients on the cruise ship quarantined off Japan have been transported to Omaha Nebraska. My biological families' homeland in America. Their medical facility is ranked at 65th in the United States for research efforts and 8th as a facility for primary care. The one redeeming quality of Omaha Nebraska is that it has a 1.2% Asian demographic. I couldn't tell if any of the patients actually hail from that part of the country (that's how we talk in the boondocks) I dunno, you figure it out from here.

On another note, the patients are either not eliciting any symptoms and the one or two that might be are recovering nicely.

[Chris]

A quick update on the Coronavirus situation, without any supporting links this time.

It is easy to get caught up in the hysteria surrounding the Coronavirus outbreak and at times I have also been caught up in it. However, it pays to calm down a bit, take a few days off the Media hoopla and non-stop flow of negative news to look at the bigger picture.

At the moment, it would seem that China's drastic quarantine measures (up to 760 millions people under some form of Quarantine, to varying degrees) are paying off and new infections and deaths within China are tapering off. This may be a false dawn, as factories slowly restart and hundreds of millions of migrant workers from the poorer provinces return to work to the rich coastal cities, but at least we know that traditional quarantine measures can work reasonably well. The real worry is localised community outbreaks in other Asian countries, notably the two Koreas, Japan, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam.

I maintain that this coronavirus seems to be mostly an Asian (East and Southeast) problem, because of the race specificity of both SARS and SARS coronavirus 2, which is the official name of this current strain. At the moment we can only guess why that is. I won't go into it now, though the science behind it, in terms of ACE 2 inhibitors that are 5 times more likely to be present in East Asian populations than Caucasians is pretty well understood and was also a notable feature of the original SARS-virus.

Clearly, the humanitarian and economic impact will be global, which I expect will pass in a few months' time, however not without severe disruption to the world economy. China will probably look a lot less attractive as an investment destination going forward and there will be many bankruptcies. An implosion of the entire financial, commercial and political system of China is not out of the question and may I say, if this Sars CoV-2 outbreak ends up being the death of the Chinese Communist Party, it will end up being a huge silver lining. A free China, organised along the lines of the Republic of China (Taiwan) would be an absolute blessing to the world. It is time that we put all of the failed ideologies of the 20th century behind us (Fascism, Communism, Socialism, National Socialism, etc...) and move on to something better.

SARS CoV-2 is still a huge threat to humanity and Asia in particular, certainly we should not be complacent and we can expect it to become endemic in the Human population. Outbreaks will happen regularly from now on and they will always be disruptive and deadly, but there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to deal with these situations as they come. The true origins of the virus will perhaps never be revealed, but wherever it came from or however it came about, it is here now and we have to accept it as part of the natural world and deal with it on those terms. After all, it is very likely, that our own species came to inhabit this planet and spread over it very much like a virus, through a similar and significantly more sophisticated act of genetic manipulation.

[Chris]

There's a lot of news on the Wuhan Coronavirus front and all of it is bad, I'm afraid. I won't even try to insert the supporting links, these stories are all over the news, but the South China Morning Post is perhaps the best mainstream news source right now.

- Sustained community outbreaks are now occurring all over Asia and probably the US and Europe as well.
- South Korea has just locked down one of its main cities due to a major outbreak that started in a local church.
- Italy is now seeing community outbreaks in the Lombardy region, in several towns near Milan
- Japan has now stopped even pretending that it can or even wants to contain its own outbreak, allowing infected Diamond Princess passengers to disembark and roam free.
- The military and prisons are now affected as well with several outbreaks even outside China
- The reinfection risk with the Wuhan Coronavirus is considerable, people who have recovered can still remain contagious and upon reinfection have a much higher chance of death, often from organ failure, particularly heart attacks
- There are disturbing reports, from mainstream medical journals, that the real death rate is more like 17 percent and the R0 value around 6.6, with this strain of SARS being 20 times more infectious than the original strain and even more deadly. That may be because gain-of-function properties from MERS, HIV and Influenza have been engineered into the virus, which is probably also the reason it escaped containment, despite all the usual precautions associated with BSL-4 labs.
- I need to reiterate this, but this virus is just incredibly contagious and nothing seems to be able to stop it or even slow it down. It is airborne, spreading even through centralised ventilation and AC systems, through sewage pipes, bodily fluids and faeces on the streets, etc... It now appears that stopping the spread of this will prove impossible and it will reach everywhere in a matter of months.
- Some projections show that up to 80 percent of the Human population will get it and with a death rate of 17 percent, over a billion deaths is not out of the question, especially in places like India and Africa.

I know this sounds like fear mongering and only yesterday I was a lot more optimistic, but these are all facts that can easily be verified and appear in mainstream news and scientific sources, so they simply cannot be ignored.

[Chris]

Well, if anyone here is still interested in the Coronavirus situation, my views have gone from pessimistic to apocalyptic.

I no longer think the pandemic can be stopped and it is probably already under way in every continent, though refusal, or in most cases inability to test is keeping the numbers artificially low. The situation in the US is particularly interesting, even though an epidemic is clearly raging in Hawaii, the CDC has withdrawn its CoV testkits as faulty, over a week ago and has yet to issue new ones. Only three states currently have the ability to even test for the virus and even they are simply not doing it. Clearly, there is a coverup of some sort going on.

The situation is already out of control in Korea (both) and Iran as well as increasingly, Italy. I estimate, that the pandemic will reach most places in the world, in a week, perhaps two at most. Evidence is growing that this an engineered bioweapon with no known cure or vaccine, with a death rate of 2-3 percent under ideal circumstances, with those infected being taken to ICU isolation wards and getting intensive care. Absent such intensive care, which becomes the norm in pandemics and when less-developed countries are involved, it is closer to 17 percent. I am convinced that more than a billion people could easily die in this pandemic and it may just keep coming back, year after year, steadily reducing the world population until some sort of immunity is developed or some vaccine / cure is found, which may be years away.

It seems that Quarantine measures are ineffective, absent full-blown hazmat suits and recirculated air. So, the facts are clear, this is it folks, the big event that most of us always knew was coming, the event that will put our current civilisation out of business. I don't know how long any of us we will have electricity or internet, this will probably vary locally (Wuhan has already been shut out of the internet, "to stop the spread of rumours"), but whilst we can still communicate, I want to wish all of you courage, perseverance and resilience in the trials to come. Not all of us are going to make it to the end of the year, but remember, even if you succumb to this disease, there is an afterlife and a heaven that awaits you, losing this body and this life is not the end of the world, there will be a continuation of your existence in a different realm and so death is nothing to fear.

It was an honour and privilege to get to know all of you guys and to be part of this community. The technological means by which we can communicate is likely to go away in a matter of months and we will have to go back to good old-fashioned talking to our neighbours (or not, because they might be contagious, of course), but I will always be with you in spirit and hopefully, we'll meet again in a better world.

I know, that at the present moment this may seem preposterous and incredibly far-fetched, but it will only be a matter of weeks until all of the above becomes generally accepted and inevitable, so just wait a few weeks before you jump to any conclusions. In the meanwhile, I will continue participating in this forum, in the short time we still have and whilst it is still possible.

[Aragorn]

Well, if anyone here is still interested in the Coronavirus situation, my views have gone from pessimistic to apocalyptic.

I no longer think the pandemic can be stopped and it is probably already under way in every continent, though refusal, or in most cases inability to test is keeping the numbers artificially low. The situation in the US is particularly interesting, even though an epidemic is clearly raging in Hawaii, the CDC has withdrawn its CoV testkits as faulty, over a week ago and has yet to issue new ones. Only three states currently have the ability to even test for the virus and even they are simply not doing it. Clearly, there is a coverup of some sort going on.

The situation is already out of control in Korea (both) and Iran as well as increasingly, Italy. I estimate, that the pandemic will reach most places in the world, in a week, perhaps two at most. Evidence is growing that this an engineered bioweapon with no known cure or vaccine, with a death rate of 2-3 percent under ideal circumstances, with those infected being taken to ICU isolation wards and getting intensive care. Absent such intensive care, which becomes the norm in pandemics and when less-developed countries are involved, it is closer to 17 percent. I am convinced that more than a billion people could easily die in this pandemic and it may just keep coming back, year after year, steadily reducing the world population until some sort of immunity is developed or some vaccine / cure is found, which may be years away.

It seems that Quarantine measures are ineffective, absent full-blown hazmat suits and recirculated air. So, the facts are clear, this is it folks, the big event that most of us always knew was coming, the event that will put our current civilisation out of business. I don't know how long any of us we will have electricity or internet, this will probably vary locally (Wuhan has already been shut out of the internet, "to stop the spread of rumours"), but whilst we can still communicate, I want to wish all of you courage, perseverance and resilience in the trials to come. Not all of us are going to make it to the end of the year, but remember, even if you succumb to this disease, there is an afterlife and a heaven that awaits you, losing this body and this life is not the end of the world, there will be a continuation of your existence in a different realm and so death is nothing to fear.

It was an honour and privilege to get to know all of you guys and to be part of this community. The technological means by which we can communicate is likely to go away in a matter of months and we will have to go back to good old-fashioned talking to our neighbours (or not, because they might be contagious, of course), but I will always be with you in spirit and hopefully, we'll meet again in a better world.

I know, that at the present moment this may seem preposterous and incredibly far-fetched, but it will only be a matter of weeks until all of the above becomes generally accepted and inevitable, so just wait a few weeks before you jump to any conclusions. In the meanwhile, I will continue participating in this forum, in the short time we still have and whilst it is still possible.

Geez Chris, you sure know how to scare the shit out of people. Yes, it's a highly worrisome phenomenon, but so have many other epidemics of late been. SARS, avian flu, swine flu, the norovirus, you name it. If you believed the sensation-horny mainstream media, then all of those diseases were slated to wipe us all from existence. Even the Y2K bug was going to kill us all, because it was going to cause all the nuclear missiles to go off on the 1st of January 2000, remember? And yet none of that happened. So instead of thinking gloom and doom, let's try looking at this from the perspective of hope, shall we?



I'm still not convinced that the Covfefe virus ─ yeah, let's have a laugh about it, dammit! ─ would a bio-weapon, by the way. I think that's just scaremongering and more blame-seeking. If you repeat the lie long enough, then enough people will eventually come to believe it, and then it'll be declared The Truth™ ─ cfr. dixit Joseph Goebbels. And we've all seen that principle at work ad nauseam by now, both in the mainstream and within this so-called alternative community. I'm getting more than a little fed up with all the hypes.

---

P.S.: On a personal note, I'm not afraid of dying. Not that I'd be looking forward toward an afterlife ─ which I do believe exists, but at this point in time, I don't particularly care for one ─ but because even though life has never granted me what I really wanted to have, I know that I have done the best I could for my fellow human beings, and therefore, that my life has had meaning. I have made a difference, because I have been the change I wanted to see. And that gives me at least some satisfaction.

[Wind]

Listen at the astrological report again, this should fade away in a month or so. It's gonna get a little worse for the time being and that's it.

[Emil El Zapato]

Son-of-a-bitch...I just heard a click and pop and my browser crashed (while I was writing a serious response)

I'm not going to do it again, but here is what I think...the active participants on this forum are likely to survive this pandemic.

[Chris]

Geez Chris, you sure know how to scare the shit out of people. Yes, it's a highly worrisome phenomenon, but so have many other epidemics of late been. SARS, avian flu, swine flu, the norovirus, you name it. If you believed the sensation-horny mainstream media, then all of those diseases were slated to wipe us all from existence. Even the Y2K bug was going to kill us all, because it was going to cause all the nuclear missiles to go off on the 1st of January 2000, remember? And yet none of that happened. So instead of thinking gloom and doom, let's try looking at this from the perspective of hope, shall we?



I'm still not convinced that the Covfefe virus ─ yeah, let's have a laugh about it, dammit! ─ would a bio-weapon, by the way. I think that's just scaremongering and more blame-seeking. If you repeat the lie long enough, then enough people will eventually come to believe it, and then it'll be declared The Truth™ ─ cfr. dixit Joseph Goebbels. And we've all seen that principle at work ad nauseam by now, both in the mainstream and within this so-called alternative community. I'm getting more than a little fed up with all the hypes.

---

P.S.: On a personal note, I'm not afraid of dying. Not that I'd be looking forward toward an afterlife ─ which I do believe exists, but at this point in time, I don't particularly care for one ─ but because even though life has never granted me what I really wanted to have, I know that I have done the best I could for my fellow human beings, and therefore, that my life has had meaning. I have made a difference, because I have been the change I wanted to see. And that gives me at least some satisfaction.

Appreciate the sentiment, but the logical fallacies in your argument are glaring. Do I really have to point them out? You can spot them yourself by re-reading your own post. The very definition of black swan event, like this one (and I've read the book), is that it cannot be predicted and doesn't follow previous patterns of behaviour.

I'm not one for fear-mongering or doom and gloom and like most people, I have been trying to convince myself that it's really not that bad, we've been through it before, it will fade, the epidemic will be brought under control, there's a vaccine, there's a cure and if all else fails, quarantine measures will work, etc...

Well, all of the above is just wishful thinking and unsupported by the facts. The actual facts on the ground paint a far worse picture than what the public generally believes and I have to go by what the facts and the math tells me.

Whether it's a bioweapon or not is beside the point, though perhaps it would explain some of its unusual properties, which appear to be gain-of-function and not naturally occurring, but in any case, they are there and we have to deal with them.

I really, truly wish I was wrong about all of this and in the last few days I was desperately looking for any good news, anything that would disprove my assessment, but I have found none. If anything, there are many unexplained things about this virus that would indicate that things are actually even worse than the picture I painted in my previous post. This is nothing like SARS or the Flu or anything else we had to deal with in living memory. Perhaps the black plague comes closest and I expect, based on the evidence, that this epidemic will have a very similar effect.

[Chris]

Listen at the astrological report again, this should fade away in a month or so. It's gonna get a little worse for the time being and that's it.

Astrology, really?

This is one of those times where perhaps we should put our faith in actual science, though ironically, it may very well have caused the problem in the first place.

Son-of-a-bitch...I just heard a click and pop and my browser crashed (while I was writing a serious response)

I'm not going to do it again, but here is what I think...the active participants on this forum are likely to survive this pandemic.

Hopefully, with divine providence, although a 6 in 7 chance of survival isn't great...

[Dreamtimer]

I'm supposed to be traveling in a couple months. I guess I'll have to see what happens. I got trip insurance, thankfully.

I met with some friends for brunch today and one of them was talking about much of what you said, Chris. It's cause for concern, no doubt.

[Wind]

Astrology, really?

Yes, mate. It's funny you should question it's validity as you've been claiming to be channeling spirits.

[Chris]

Yes, mate. It's funny you should question it's validity as you've been claiming to be channeling spirits.

It's not personal, I just don't think that astrology is the right tool to be predicting and tackling an epidemic. Though perhaps, yes in the grand scheme of things, certain things can be predicted by astrological means.

I'm supposed to be traveling in a couple months. I guess I'll have to see what happens. I got trip insurance, thankfully.

I met with some friends for brunch today and one of them was talking about much of what you said, Chris. It's cause for concern, no doubt.

Actually, I'm concerned that people aren't talking about it. I was just talking to my sister, my brother and the rest of my family today and they didn't even know that there was already an epidemic in Northern Italy, just a few hundred miles from us. They appeared to have no clue what a quarantine means and how to prepare for it. I mean we'll be fine, my sister has a farm and we could probably survive there indefinitely if needed, but the lack of knowledge amongst the general public is worrying.

[Emil El Zapato]

Astrology predictions are only as good as the astrologer...I think Wind's guy is pretty good...just my opinion of course...

[Chris]

Astrology predictions are only as good as the astrologer...I think Wind's guy is pretty good...just my opinion of course...

"Western" (in truth, Indian) Astrology never did it for me, but I must admit that Chinese astrology has been scarily accurate at times, especially in terms of predicting specific personality traits.

I think that Astrology is such an inexact science (if you can call it that) with so much open to interpretation and even intuition, that is just isn't a very useful tool in predicting events such as the spread of en epidemic. It may have some utility in one's personal life or in the general direction of global events, I'll give you that.

As Wind's dig has alluded to, I'm not opposed to using non-traditional means when it comes to predicting, big apocalyptic events, but in this case, I'd rather put my faith in science. And, I must say, I am not discounting the effect of divine providence and we may yet witness a Deus ex machina event, where the gods intercede on our behalf, despite the fact that we richly deserve what's coming to us.