Covid19 Corona Virus

Author: ebuc

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...."For instance, coronaviruses and influenzaviruses have a lipid envelope (membrane) around the capsid (protein shell) and rhinoviruses, which cause the common cold, do not. Here is a brief rundown of some of the other differences.

.....“Coronavirus” is one of a family of genetically related viruses. The name comes from what the particles look like under electron microscopy. The particles are fringed with knob-like protrusions, resembling a crown (Corona is Latin for crown). 

...Coronaviuses have RNA genomes that are made of a single strand of RNA in what’s called the positive sense. This means that that the viral genome can be immediately turned into viral protein by the cell’s protein-making machine, the ribosome.

...Influenzaviruses also have RNA genomes – but the genome comes in eight separate pieces of single-stranded, negative sense RNA. This means that the virus has to bring its own set of enzymes for converting the negative sense genome pieces into positive sense ones, so the viral RNA can be translated into proteins by the cell’s ribosomes.

...The genomes of rhinoviruses are made from a single piece of positive sense, single stranded RNA, similar to coronaviruses. The genome is packaged into a protein shell that is icosahedral, resembling a 20-sided die used in board games."....

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..."Previous research revealed that coronaviruses invade cells through so-called “spike” proteins, but those proteins take on different shapes in different coronaviruses.

....Figuring out the shape of the spike protein in SARS-Cov-2 is the key to figuring out how to target the virus, said Jason McLellan, senior author of the study and an associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

...Though the coronavirus uses many different proteins to replicate and invade cells, the spike protein is the major surface protein that it uses to bind to a receptor — another protein that acts like a doorway into a human cell.

.....After the spike protein binds to the human cell receptor, the viral membrane fuses with the human cell membrane, allowing the genome of the virus to enter human cells and begin infection. So “if you can prevent attachment and fusion, you will prevent entry,” McLellan told Live Science. But to target this protein, you need to know what it looks like. "....



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@ebuc
The info you've provided is much appreciated, but I do feel the need to correct one of the statements you've quoted, which I know to be inaccurate. 

...."For instance, coronaviruses and influenzaviruses have a lipid envelope (membrane) around the capsid (protein shell) and rhinoviruses, which cause the common cold, do not."

Much as this person appears to be quite the expert of virology, this statement is problematic because it assumes that rhinoviruses are the only causes of the common cold.

"Other viruses that can cause colds include respiratory syncytial virus, human parainfluenza viruses, adenovirus, human coronaviruses, and human metapneumovirus."


This is because the common cold, unlike the flu, is not caused by a single virus. The symptoms are certainly not ubiquitous, but they are common to a variety of viruses, hence the term "common cold." Note that coronaviruses (in bold) are in that mix.
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useless post
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..."This is because the common cold, unlike the flu, is not caused by a single virus. The symptoms are certainly not ubiquitous, but they are common to a variety of viruses, hence the term "common cold." Note that coronaviruses (in bold) are in that mix."...

Ergo no vaccine for common colds either, whereas we do have flu vaccines?
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@ebuc
That does make things more difficult, though the flu virus is highly mutagenic, particularly in its surface proteins, which are usually the targets of the immune system. That's part of why it's so difficult to handle. Colds, at least in theory, could have associated vaccines, though the main problem is in how they infect you. A cold virus plants itself at the back of your throat and stimulates the immune response, whereas a flu virus gets deeper into the body, meaning that the rate of response may only be somewhat important for a cold because a rapid response doesn't really change disease progression, but very important for a flu because it can address the consequences of disease spread. COVID-19 behaves more like a flu virus than a cold virus.
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@whiteflame
but very important for a flu because it can address the consequences of disease spread. COVID-19 behaves more like a flu virus than a cold virus.

#1......The genomes of rhinoviruses are made from a single piece of positive sense, single stranded RNA, similar to coronaviruses."....

I dont understand what the "positive" or "negative sense" is as mentioned #1.
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@ebuc
That much I can certainly speak to. Think of RNA as you would DNA: 2 strands complementary to each other. If you separated those strands, one would be positive and one would be negative. The positive strand usually represents the strand that encodes protein, whereas the negative strand is merely its complement. So what this virologist means is that the virus has a genome that is composed of RNA that can be shuttled straight to the cell’s ribosomes and translated into proteins without any other steps in between. It’s equipped to work very quickly and relies on very little from its host as compared with other viruses. Does that make sense?
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@whiteflame
...."For instance, coronaviruses and influenzaviruses have a lipid envelope (membrane) around the capsid (protein shell) and rhinoviruses, which cause the common cold, do not."

Much as this person appears to be quite the expert of virology, this statement is problematic because it assumes that rhinoviruses are the only causes of the common cold.

It doesn't assume that though. It says rhinoviruses cause the common cold, it does not say nothing else causes the common cold.
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Alright, then I'm simply filling in the gap in his explanation because, at least based on this interview, it was unclear that there are any other viruses that cause the common cold. It may not be an assumption, but the omission is itself problematic.
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@whiteflame
You have been here a year and a half yet have under 50 posts. Is this because you usually lurk the forums or ignore them?
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The latter. I'm writing my dissertation, and I haven't had the time to spend on here that I did on DDO.
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@whiteflame
..."That does make things more difficult, though the flu virus is highly mutagenic, particularly in its surface proteins, which are usually the targets of the immune system. That's part of why it's so difficult to handle. Colds, at least in theory, could have associated vaccines, though the main problem is in how they infect you. A cold virus plants itself at the back of your throat and stimulates the immune response, whereas a flu virus gets deeper into the body, meaning that the rate of response may only be somewhat important for a cold because a rapid response doesn't really change disease progression, but very important for a flu because it can address the consequences of disease spread. COVID-19 behaves more like a flu virus than a cold virus.'

Thx for the elaborating clarifications, tho I'm a little slow/retarded in following the above except for the part I embolden.  Also I'm stressed out and tired and more.  Sorry.


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@ebuc
No worries. I'll try to explain this another way. The influenza virus is really prone to mutation, and most of those mutations happen in the proteins that our bodies target when they infect us. That's part of why it's so difficult to make a good vaccine that covers every influenza strain - they are very diverse and hard to target as a result. 

As for the latter part of that post, it's important to think about what the speed of your body's response to a virus means. If it's just responding to a virus that wants a response, e.g. a cold virus, then it does not matter how quickly it responds. The virus is getting the response it wants, and is getting coughed and sneezed into new victims. If the virus is trying to evade the immune system in order to establish a greater infection in the host, e.g. influenza and COVID-19, then a faster response can prevent that establishment. It will still spread regardless, but influenza and COVID-19 can't do a lot of damage if it can't get into your lungs and cause the pneumonia-like response.



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..."That much I can certainly speak to. Think of RNA as you would DNA: 2 strands complementary to each other. If you separated those strands, one would be positive and one would be negative. The positive strand usually represents the strand that encodes protein, whereas the negative strand is merely its complement. So what this virologist means is that the virus has a genome that is composed of RNA that can be shuttled straight to the cell’s ribosomes and translated into proteins without any other steps in between. It’s equipped to work very quickly and relies on very little from its host as compared with other viruses. Does that make sense?"..


Yes it does make some sense to me.  I had never thought of DNA as left and right or positive and negative. Sorry I'm tired and over worked and stressed out et...

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@whiteflame
..."No worries. I'll try to explain this another way. The influenza virus is really prone to mutation, and most of those mutations happen in the proteins that our bodies target when they infect us. That's part of why it's so difficult to make a good vaccine that covers every influenza strain - they are very diverse and hard to target as a result. "...


As are bacteria prone to mutation if not more so. I dunno. However, we do have vaccines for those infulenza viri, we jut dont know which one is going to be most prevalant each winter. If I understand correctly, and we we only vaccine for a couple each year. why we dont vaccine for all know strains I dunno.  maybe that is just way too many vaccines to give .

As for why we dont have any vaccines for cold virus, it appears instead of the immune system kicking in, the cold virus avoids immune system by creating a cough or sneeze to spread and proliferate itself in other hosts.


Yet, it does cause us other symtoms similar to influenza, just less severe.  H,mmm.

..."As for the latter part of that post, it's important to think about what the speed of your body's response to a virus means. If it's just responding to a virus that wants a response, e.g. a cold virus, then it does not matter how quickly it responds. The virus is getting the response it wants, and is getting coughed and sneezed into new victims. If the virus is trying to evade the immune system in order to establish a greater infection in the host, e.g. influenza and COVID-19, then a faster response can prevent that establishment. It will still spread regardless, but influenza and COVID-19 can't do a lot of damage if it can't get into your lungs and cause the pneumonia-like response."...




111 days later

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ICU pulmonary doctor tells what he has observed ergo front line news from hands-on experience
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Record spikes in covid19 occurring across USA.  Duhh, is anyone surprised?  Yeah the ignorant are surprised.

Its just governor Cumo predicted, ---warned USA--  what they  { N.Y. } experience ins spring has come to other states, hospitals near maximum operational capacity and soon to go over their limits

22 days later

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...."But here is where Covid gets scary. Children might want to leave the room now.

.....SARS-CoV-2, alone among known viruses, blocks the neighborhood watchtower gene while at the same time overstimulating the call for reinforcements. Once it hacks the genome of its first cell, it makes a protein that blocks that cell from warning its neighbors. It fells the watchtower. There are no limits to replication for at least the first few days. When cytokines do arrive, they come in such panic numbers that they produce a storm of inflammation at the infection site. That induces a runaway cell destruction that kills the patient.

...Think of it as similar to an asymmetric warfare tactic used in Baghdad or Kabul. A small device detonates in a busy market, killing and injuring many civilians. First responders and police rush to the scene and then a larger device detonates.
New Normals
Writing for the online journal MedPage on July 27, Dr. Fred Pelzman, a recovering Covid patient himself, said:
Many patients who suffered severe pneumonia are still in the recovery phase, with prolonged fatigue and ongoing dyspnea. They tell us they are still “not themselves,” and have a sense of constriction and pulling to their breath. More than likely, as symptoms persist, we will start to evaluate these patients further, with repeat chest imaging and pulmonary function tests.
We may as yet discover what kind of lung disease this is, this residual damage, and whether it responds to medications for asthma or COPD or maybe something else. Or maybe just gradually resolves. Or maybe leaves some people with chronic damage and deficits.
I’ve seen a few patients who have residual loss of their sense of taste or smell. For me, while for a few weeks there I could barely smell or taste anything, now 4 months out I’ve noticed that some of my favorite foods just don’t taste the same, that many foods have lost the depth of flavor I’m used to tasting, and that certain smells, from my aftershave to my morning cup of coffee, are even bordering on the newly unpleasant.
I’ve had patients tell me their OCD has ratcheted up, their anxiety medicines are not working, they find themselves crying all the time without any other symptoms of depression. One patient told me that she’d noticed that she could no longer do math in her head. Something as simple as calculating the tip at a restaurant, which used to be incredibly easy for her, now was something she had to slowly and methodically work out.
Another interesting type of clinical presentation that I and a few colleagues have seen, although we’re not sure if this is a definitive syndrome or not, has been patients, several months out from recovery from their Covid-19, calling up with a panic that they now feel the exact same symptoms they had when they became sick initially. We’ve seen a few patients who’ve had the exact same clinical presentation as before, feeling feverish, diffuse body aches, cough, even a few patients who feel they’ve noticed a change in their sense of taste or smell.
As we evaluated them, we feared that we were seeing that thing we all dread so much, the definitive evidence that patients can get this disease twice. Luckily, all of the repeat swabs on these few cases we’ve seen have come back negative, and interestingly, once the swab results came back, the symptoms rapidly abated in most of these patients. Is this some form of post-traumatic stress response, or some underlying residual inflammatory process that may get reawakened, or reactivated as antibody levels drop off?
Virologists cannot yet say that CoV-2 antigen immunity, once established, persists, which is to say we don’t yet know if you can get Covid a second time, or a third; whether it is worse the next time; whether blood-derived vaccines would work in that case; or therefore, whether there is even the possibility of “herd immunity” or vaccination.
A survey of the Spanish population published July 6 in The Lancet found that 95% were seronegative to SARS-CoV-2 infection (had no antibodies), even in hotspot areas, despite many of the same individuals having tested positive before. It found that 14% of persons who had previously developed antibodies no longer had them a month later. Ian Jones, a professor of virology at the University of Reading, said, “Anyone who tests positive by antibody test should not assume they are protected. They may be, but it is not clear.”

....Since no-one, not even the Chinese, can answer these questions about immunity yet, the only thing that can be said for sure is that Covid will be around for a while. This is not a second wave. It is not even the second inning of the first wave. This will not be going away by September. It will not likely be gone by the September after that. Covid could be something more like the Black Plague that showed up in 1346 and ended in 1353 after killing 30% to 60% of Europe’s population of the time. Or maybe it will be like the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904, which was followed by an aftershock in 1907–1908. Worst case: it is with us for the rest of the century, as Bubonic Plague was for the Ottoman Empire for the whole of the 18th Century.

...If outliers like the USA, Russia, and Brazil were to join the consensus shared by Nordic, Asian and Oceanic nations and take common-sense public health measures, even they could have Covid under control enough to resume much of the old normal in 6 to 8 weeks.

.....That’s a moot point, though, because the United States will not begin behaving rationally any time soon. Next week we’ll look more at the implications."....

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Running Strong For Ameican Youth....Idian Country News regarding Covid19

..."The greatest amount of freedom calls for the utmost degree of individual and collective discipline.”......
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.....“It will go away like things go away.”
— Donald Trump

......“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
— Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

...".Last week we looked a the physical side of Covid. This week we’ll explore the mental side. According to a study published in Lancet Psychiatry, 39 of 125 hospitalized Covid patients in the UK had altered mental status, although only 16 showed brain inflammation or swelling. Of those with no physical signs of brain damage, 92% were new psychiatric diagnoses: 43% had new-onset psychosis, 26% had a neurocognitive, dementia-like syndrome, and 17% had an affective disorder. While most of those who experienced a stroke were over the age of 60 (82%), about half with an altered mental state were under 60 (49%). About 26% of patients with new-onset neuropsychiatric disorders were in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

.......In another study in Spain neurologic manifestations were seen in 57.4% of 841 patients hospitalized in March and 4.1% of their deaths listed neurologic complications as the primary cause. Disorders of consciousness (hallucinations, loss of senses, or cognitive deterioration) were nearly twice as high (38.9%) among patients with severe Covid-19. 14.9% had delirium and 9.4% went into coma. While coma and stroke emerged in later stages of the progression, decaying neurologic symptoms emerged throughout all phases of infection.
The mere fact of being in an ICU can also lead to cognitive impairment. The effect of more than a week in intensive care is comparable to that of a major head injury. The problems are linked to the delirium people often fall into when severely ill and heavily sedated in an unfamiliar environment. Delirium is a particular problem with Covid-19, says Dale Needham of Johns Hopkins University. Patients spend a long time in the ICU during which they see no one they know — and the strangers caring for them in heavy-duty protective wear “look like aliens.”
The mental impairment brought on by Covid compounds the problems of coping with the pandemic, and also with the many other crises that pre-existed Covid. It is similar to the compounding problem of lead poisoning in Ancient Rome that reduced mental capacity at a moment when the Empire was increasingly under siege. High-born Romans sipped beverages cooked in lead vessels and channeled spring water into their homes through lead pipes that likely increased lead body burdens by hundreds of times. This disproportionately struck the wealthy, Senators, courtiers, and others of elevated social rank. By making their leadership stupid, the Romans essentially decapitated themselves. From about the first century BC, the culture lost its progressive edge and fell into wine, orgies, and watching cooking show reruns on TV.

Various cultural critics have associated the start of the USA’s social collapse with Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of the fairness doctrine at the FCC, allowing Fox Corp, MSNBC, and other agenda-driven “news” outlets to ramp up fake news into ubiquity. How often have you had to endure a propaganda stream worthy of North Korea while sitting in the waiting room of your dentist or a public health clinic?

Other historians have flagged Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America that brought scorched earth policies to the Grand Old Party and replaced collegial compromise with Mitch McConnell. Costly government shutdowns for no apparent reason apart from a test of wills became de rigueur rituals of manliness. Governance by uncompromising partisanship was, to governance, “as miniature golf is to golf,” a senior congressional reporter said at the time.

....For my part, I’d place the USA’s descent into the present internecine bloodbath squarely along the timeline of any post-classic civilization at that precise point where a gentle glide path from complexity to simplicity becomes Lord of the Flies.

...Enter the plague. How an organized, well-educated, science-based culture deals with a relentless zoonotic outbreak is very different from how a pack of gibbering Spring Breakers or Xanax-swigging couch potatoes do.

......The seeds of American dysfunctionalism were planted when English settlers arrived in Jamestown and Plymouth and later took the remaining parts from the Dutch, French, Spanish and Russians, oh, and not to mention the indigenous peoples. Their perverted strain of brutal exceptionalism has been described with an equal measure of admiration and horror by historians from Alexis de Tocqueville to Sarah Vowell.

...But the cancerous product of digital media we see today is not confined to the US. It’s spreading seen and unseen everywhere, even to Wuhan. Social media, going back to the Zuckerberg/Winklevoss origin story from Harvard in the 00s, is based on remorseless, non-human algorithms that exploit confirmation and normalcy biases, tribalism, discount factors, and hunger for approval, to generate ad-revenue-generating page-views.

Positive feedback mechanisms are always dangerous because they can and will spiral out of control. Pandemics, defense budgets, and climate change share this attribute with Twitter, Face, WeChat, WhatsApp, Instagram, and all the rest. They are gremlins that should never be fed after midnight. But clandestine social engineering, intended or unintended, corrupts the foundations of the growth that sustains it. It gnaws away at human potential and faith in empiricism the way acid rain erases hieroglyphs in Egypt.

....Covid is swarming with positive feedbacks. A dearth of tests allowed unconfirmed cases to create still more cases, defeating contact tracing and flooding hospitals, which ran out of beds, masks, and protective gowns. Social media amplified Trump/Johnson/Lopez-Obrador/Bolsonaro misleading messages, which elevated fear and anxiety, which caused people to spend more time scouring for information on social media, much of it false or misleading.

....In some warped sense, digital mass communication might be viewed as a balance nature has supplied that will eventually restore the proper order of things; an over-arching negative feedback. Whether it ends the world by zoonosis or by a nuclear exchange based upon divergent readings of the footnotes in the Muller Report is not yet knowable.".....

Ed Yong, in “How The Pandemic Defeated America” in The Atlantic, wrote:
Clear distribution of accurate information is among the most important defenses against an epidemic’s spread. And yet the largely unregulated, social-media-based communications infrastructure of the 21st century almost ensures that misinformation will proliferate fast. “In every outbreak throughout the existence of social media, from Zika to Ebola, conspiratorial communities immediately spread their content about how it’s all caused by some government or pharmaceutical company or Bill Gates,” says Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, who studies the flow of online information. When COVID‑19 arrived, “there was no doubt in my mind that it was coming.”
Sure enough, existing conspiracy theories — George Soros! 5G! Bioweapons! — were repurposed for the pandemic. An infodemic of falsehoods spread alongside the actual virus. Rumors coursed through online platforms that are designed to keep users engaged, even if that means feeding them content that is polarizing or untrue. In a national crisis, when people need to act in concert, this is calamitous.

7 days later

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...."Humans have never been particularly good at eradicatingentire viruses, and COVID-19 might not be any different.

......More than 19 million people have tested positive for thecoronavirus globally, and at least 722,000 have died. In the U.S., nearly 5million people have tested positive and more than 160,000 have died. Whilescientists are racing to find a cure for the virus, there's a chance COVID-19will never fully go away — with or without a vaccine.
But that doesn't mean everyone will have to self-isolateforever.
Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus researcher at theUniversity of Texas Medical Branch, told NPR's Weekend Edition that one of themore likely scenarios is that the spread of COVID-19 will eventually be slowedas a result of herd immunity. He said that he'd be surprised "if we'restill wearing masks and 6-feet distancing in two or three years" and thatin time, the virus could become no more serious than the common cold.
.....On why it is so hard to eradicate this virus
....The first thing to remember is that we haven't beensuccessful at eradicating many viruses at all. Really the lone exception issmallpox, but many of these viruses exist not only in the human population butin animal populations. So coronaviruses may be removed from the humanpopulation, like SARS coronavirus in 2002, but we know that those viruses orviruses that are similar to it still exist in nature and at any time they maygain the tools to reemerge in humans again.
....On the outlook for COVID-19 immunity as morepeople are exposed to the virus
....So  it's still up inthe air. COVID-19 is really unique in a couple of different ways. One, like thecommon cold coronaviruses, it spreads very easily, but unlike those, thiscauses this severe disease. What we know about the common cold coronaviruses isthat the immunity to those don't actually stay that long. So what is not clearis if immunity will wane over time and that in two or three years you could beexposed and get this virus again. Similar to how you could get the common coldcoronavirus every few years.
.....On the other end of that, viruses like SARS and MERS, ifyou get those infections and you overcome them and you recover, generally yourimmune response lasts a long time. So what we don't know with COVID-19 is whichof these two poles it may end up at.
....On what he predicts for the future for COVID-19
.....I'd be surprised if we're still wearing masks and 6-feetdistancing in two or three years. I think the most likely outcome is that we'lleventually get to herd immunity. The best way to get to herd immunity isthrough a vaccine and some certain populations who have already been exposed orwill be exposed.
And then the expectation I have is that this virus willactually become the next common cold coronavirus. What we don't know with thesecommon cold coronaviruses is if they went through a similar transition period.
.....So, say something like OC43, which is a common coldcoronavirus that was originally from cows. It's been historically reported thatthere was an outbreak associated with the transition of this virus from cows tohumans that was a very severe disease, and then after a few years, the virusbecame just the common cold. So in three to five years it may be that you'restill getting COVID-19 in certain populations of people or every few years, butthe expectation is hopefully that it'll just be a common cold and it'ssomething that we can just each deal with and it won't lead to hospitalizationand the shutting down of society."....



27 days later

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...."LONDON (Reuters) - The weekly number of positive COVID-19 cases in England jumped 43% at the end of August compared to the previous week, according to the latest data released on Thursday, a day after the government introduced new restrictions on social gatherings.

....NHS Test and Trace said 9,864 new people tested positive for COVID-19 in England in the week from Aug.27 to Sept.2, the highest number of weekly positive cases since the tracking service was launched in May, in what it called a "notable increase".

.....The number of cases across Britain has begun to rise sharply in recent days, prompting Prime Minister Boris Johnson to ban groups of more than six people from meeting, as the government tries to keep the spread of the virus under control.

....On Wednesday, the UK reported 2,659 confirmed new cases of COVID-19, slightly below the almost 3,000 new cases reported on Sunday and Monday. But cases are tracking much higher than the levels of around 1,000 per day recorded in August.
The Test and Trace scheme is seen as key to locating outbreaks quickly. The government wants to use local lockdowns to reduce transmission in COVID-19 hotspots while allowing life elsewhere to continue closer to normal.".....
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..."Thursday, the team at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) released its latest pandemic forecast. It was not encouraging. In the likeliest scenario, the IHME researchers now predict that an additional 220,000 people will die of COVID-19 by the end of 2020, bringing America’s total death toll to 410,000 and more than doubling the current tally of 190,000, which took the U.S. nine tragic months to reach, in less than half that time. 
Estimated daily infections — which include all reported cases plus those undetected by testing, and which the IHME currently pegs around 140,000 — would nearly triple to 373,000 by mid-November. In early December, daily deaths would surpass April highs."
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.."In addition to mechanistic information, researchers have also evaluated the size and content characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 particles. Upon analysis of negative-stained SARS-CoV-2 articles by electron microscopy, researchers have determined the diameter of this virus to range between 60 nanometers (nm) to a maximum diameter of 140 nanometers (nm).

...In addition to measuring the spherical size of the virus particle, it has also been confirmed that the length of the size tumors that surround the outermost surface of SARS-CoV-2 can vary in length from 9 to 12 nm.
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...."A new KFF analysis finds that 80 percent of people who have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. to date were age 65 or older, though the share varies considerably by state — from a high of 94 percent in Idaho to a low of 70 percent in the District of Columbia.

...The analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides clear evidence of the toll that the novel coronavirus has taken on older Americans. It also provides a more detailed picture of where the impact on seniors has been the greatest.

.....The analysis finds that states that have seen the largest share of COVID-19 deaths among people 65 and older include those that have had a disproportionate number of deaths in long-term care facilities. These states include Idaho (with 94% of deaths among those 65 and older), New Hampshire (92%), Massachusetts (90%), Rhode Island (90%), Minnesota (89%), Connecticut (89%), Pennsylvania (87%), Ohio (86%), Kentucky (84%), and Delaware (83%).
States in which deaths among those 65 and older account for a somewhat lower share of all COVID-19 deaths compared to the national average are in the South and Sun Belt.

.....Many of these states are hotspots where the virus has surged more recently and where deaths among older adults may be lagging, including Alabama (where 76% of COVID-19 deaths are among those 65 and older), Tennessee (76%), Nevada (75%), Arizona (74%), Mississippi (74%), Arkansas (71%), New Mexico (71%), and Texas (70%)."......

The rebel south may rise again, but  less of them will be over 65.... :--O.... Out with the old an in with the new, make new friends and loose the old, one silver and the other is dead. Sung to tune make new friends.
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@3RU7AL


..."Wear a mask consistently and correctly
“We need, as a nation, to show a degree of consistency of everybody” following public-health recommendations on wearing masks or other face coverings, said Dr. Fauci.
“What we need is to get the message across that we are all in this together. And it’s important because one of the purposes of the masks is that if you may be inadvertently walking around not knowing you’re infected—to protect others from getting infected,” Dr. Fauci said. “We have to keep hammering home with that message.”
Dr. Fauci said he’s “very pleased to see the president is wearing masks more often now,” and added that Vice President Mike Pence “wears masks when he goes out and is in situations where masks are needed.”
The nation “needs more of that consistency,” he said. The goal, Dr. Fauci added later in the interview, should be “universal wearing of masks.”
Learn from AMA President Susan R. Bailey, MD, about why it’s time to #MaskUp."...

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Here is nice balance on a theory with circumstantial and rational, logical common sense.  Wear the mask of for self and other to reduce the spread less deaths.

This is really good for all to read irrespective of our views.
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..."CDC chief says masks better at stopping coronavirus than a vaccine".....

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@ebuc
I'm still waiting for "actual real science" (instead of pure opinion) before I'm convinced that wearing a napkin over your face will do anything at all to stop THE PLAGUE!!!