‘It Hit Fast’: U.S. Evacuees From Wuhan Relieved After Landing in SoCal for Voluntary Quarantine Amid Coronavirus Fears

ktla ^ | 01/30/2020

[GOPJ]

“...Corona virus. It is said that it was merged with an unknown virus. Sounds suspect.? - - American in Israel

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http://www.tinyurl.com/cvirusmap

[blueplum]

doesn’t the kill rate seem too low for bio? Just seems to me if it was a concentrated bio of a chronic bat infection, we’d have dead bats everywhere because infected bats used to a low level infection wouldn’t be able to handle a concentrated form and would leave a now-concentrated virus on the fruit they were munching on for other bats to catch. So why are no bats falling from the sky? Snakes can’t be a vector because corona doesn’t live in cold-blooded critters. But I don’t know much about bio, and hope to never have to.

[blueplum]

In fairness, it didn’t seem a big deal until Jan 13 - i.e., 2 weeks ago with an international case. The (5) cases in the US are all still alive. No deaths outside China except Shanghai unless somebody died today

Dec 12 - first case
Dec 31 - 27 cases of ‘pneumonia’
Jan 1 - 40 cases
Jan 7 - China identifies virus - 44 cases
Jan 9 - first death, 61yo man with preexisting
Jan 12 - China releases virus sequencing. WHO says all cases are meat-market related, almost all are workers at market
Jan 13 - first international case - Thailand - onset of illness Jan 5 after visiting a meat market (from what we know of incubation, the meat market visit could have been 2-9 days prior to first symptoms)
Jan 15 - second death, 69 yo man with preexisting
Jan 20 - person-to-person transmission claimed by China - 282 confirmed sick - XI makes public statement. CDC cannot confirm person-to-person
Jan 21 - first US case - Seattle. China claims ‘superspreader’ possibility - now it’s a problem
Jan 30 - CDC does confirm person-to-person (from intimate relationship - same as original cases in China)

[Wizdum]

Bio weaponry is not about killing your opponent, but stopping the infrastructure. If there is a bad enough bug that causes violent diarrhea or vomiting on a massive scale, then social services start shutting down, people stop going to work, basically, things start shutting down because everyone is sick.
Doesn't have to kill them, just disable them.

[blueplum]

ok. I get the disable thing. But fruit bats are a staple food for much of Asia’s poor and subsistence farmers. Maybe the ingur muslims eat them too, who knows? So if one party is targeting another party’s infrastructure, engineered batflu seems a really bad choice to take down a middle-class urban area that’s not so partial to bat. And an especially bad choice when, out of fear, it takes an important protein source completely off the table, so to speak, in an entire geographical region - all of EastAsia - not just one’s target. That’s pretty sloppy. When dysentery, for instance, could do just as much damage but remained localized. And would be less traceable to an end-source like the shiny bio lab next door. But who knows with China.

I’d be curious to learn if the CDC/WHO has thought ahead and set traps to determine how rapidly and how widespread the batflu has spread in regional bats.