Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

In my day, never was longer.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

In after Baud. Damn.

A consequence of cucumbers

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Joe Lieberman disappointingly reemerged to remind us that he’s still alive.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Come on, man.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

He really is that stupid.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / Novel Coronavirus Update – Wednesday / Thursday

Novel Coronavirus Update – Wednesday / Thursday

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…“I think at this point, containment is already a lost cause,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Osterholm’s comments echoed grim realism from health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a call with reporters early this week.

Although the disease’s severity appears to be lower than once feared, Osterholm said the 2019 novel coronavirus’s transmission patterns so far are reminiscent of influenza. “To the extent that we have to deal with this, if this in fact is being transmitted like influenza, then there really isn’t much chance to contain it,” he said. “We can surely minimize transmission in health care facilities and some public spaces. But beyond that, this virus is going to kind of do what it damn pleases.”

Several other experts, while offering somewhat more optimistic outlooks, agreed that the world was entering a critical phase that will determine—over the next few weeks —whether the epidemic that has spread from China to at least two dozen other countries goes nuclear.

One key variable driving the epidemic’s potential severity is whether epidemiologists see ongoing, sustained transmission of the virus to people with no travel history to China or clear connections to others who have been there. So far, most of the human-to-human spread beyond China has been limited to close contacts of infected patients, which some researchers have pointed to as a hopeful sign.

“If this remains limited in nature, the epidemic can be contained,” said Jason Kindrachuk, an expert on emerging viruses at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, in an email to The Daily Beast. “If we start seeing sustained human-to-human transmission outside of China, there will likely be some pretty quick revisiting of current screening procedures,” he added…

Tempering reports that the outbreak may be considerably larger than initially thought, emerging data also suggest that it may be less deadly than other recent outbreaks. A Feb. 3 report from the South China Morning Post, for example, suggested that the more than 5,000 reported cases in Wuhan by that point were “just the tip of the iceberg” due to a shortage of testing kits in the outbreak’s epicenter (several modeling studies have likewise pointed to much higher numbers). The report, however, also suggests that the true proportion of fatal cases—officially hovering around 3 percent for the city and surrounding Hubei province—might be significantly lower since milder cases would be more likely to go undiagnosed…


Reader Interactions

9Comments

  3. 3.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Very glad to see pieces and commentaries in MSM that address China and the CCP regime as they are, rather than as imagined. It has been sorely lacking in the past three years. I hope They are longer lived than the current relative openness with in China.

  5. 5.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    So it mostly kills old white men….how long before the right wing conspiracy mill craps out that this is a Chinese plot to kill off Trump voters and thereby rig the next election?

  6. 6.

    low-tech cyclist

    The patients most affected by the new coronavirus seem to be middle-aged and older men. The least affected: children.

    All of a sudden a cynical part of my soul is rooting for the damned virus.  It would certainly improve the quality of our electorate!

    And I say this even though I’m a man in my mid-60s.

  7. 7.

    Marigold

    @YY_Sima Qian: I meant to reply to your post yesterday, but thank you for sharing your experiences with us.

    One of our suppliers at work is located in Hubei province, and while I don’t have direct dealings with anyone there, I worry about them like I do the jackals here. You (and the poor purchasing guy I bother) have helped a lot.

    Hope you and your family continue to be healthy and safe.

  9. 9.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @La Gata Gris: Such a tragedy… Chinese social media are flooded with people posting condolences and memorials. It’s like all the pent up frustrations, fear, sorrow and anguish suddenly have crystallized and found an outlet that everyone can share. Even state media personalities are joining in.

    A lot of people sharing the Solzhenitsyn’s quote:” We know they are lying, they know that they are lying. They know that we know that they are lying, we know that they know that we know that they are lying. Yet they continue to lie.”

    The outpouring of emotions has not yet turned toward the central leadership, but it will be interesting to see how the government censors respond.

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