The Wuhan Virus

Higher than 2.0

"The mean estimate of R0 for the 2019-nCoV ranges from 3.30 (95%CI: 2.73-3.96) to 5.47 (95%CI: 4.16-7.10), and significantly larger than 1. Our findings indicate the potential of 2019-nCoV to cause outbreaks."

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.23.916395v1

Dormant period is up to 2 weeks - not necessarily 2 weeks.

Shortest incubation period 1 day, longest 14 days, current average as of Jan 26 2020 was 10 days of incubation.

I'm not sure what the latter is based on. Up to 5m people may have left Wuhan before the city was locked down.

What's more is that Hong Kong has still not restricted travel, while offering free medical care to anyone. As a HKer, that makes me especially nervous.

Well, they could take a leaf from India and just rename the city? Although, politically motivated in India, it works. Eventually Bombay became Mumbai, Bangalore is Bengaluru, Madras is now Chennai and what was known as Allahabad is now Prayagraj.

I don't think about Spanish flu when I think about travel to Spain.

I thought it was coronavirus already?

I'm fairly sure the name "Wuhan coronavirus" is a colloquial name and the proper name is actually 2019-nCoV. It was first found in 2019, and it is a novel (n) Corona Virus (CoV).

Corona stock is plummeting, buy the dip!

Officially, sure, but unofficially people will remember it like that for some time. In Dutch we have "Mexicaanse Griep" (Mexican Flu) which is H1N1: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexicaanse_griep

In English I think it's more commonly referred to as "swine flu" though.

Too late for Old Lyme, Connecticut.

Because Hubei Virus isn't specific enough? What about MERS? Blemishes entire Middle East?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndro...

What do you think the name sars mean ... Hong Kong or macau?

My erm… favourite example of naming is: "Syphilis had a variety of names, usually people naming it after an enemy or a country they thought responsible for it. The French called it the ‘Neapolitan disease’, the ‘disease of Naples’ or the ‘Spanish disease’, and later grande verole or grosse verole, the ‘ great pox’, the English and Italians called it the ‘French disease’, the ‘Gallic disease’, the ‘morbus Gallicus’, or the ‘French pox’, the Germans called it the ‘French evil’, the Scottish called it the ‘grandgore‘, the Russians called it the ‘Polish disease’, the Polish and the Persians called it the ‘Turkish disease’, the Turkish called it the ‘Christian disease’, the Tahitians called it the ‘British disease’, in India it was called the ‘Portuguese disease’, in Japan it was called the ‘Chinese pox’, and there are some references to it being called the ‘Persian fire’." — https://jmvh.org/article/syphilis-its-early-history-and-trea...

Marburg comes to mind. First thing I think about when I meet someone from there

I'm not sure I would call a/c/g/t the opcodes, I deem them to be the equivalents of 0 and 1. Opcodes could probably be some proteins?

There's also lots of information at other layers, e.g. epigenetics, that is difficult to capture and adds additional complexity to interpreting a genome, in addition to elaborate post-processing and other aspects of the 'compiler'.

The genomic machinery is incredible complex and messy. Imagine some code, that is interpreted by little machines not created by that code, that then create other machines, that read that code in a different way, to create other machines, that copy that code, which is then read by other machines, etc, etc. These "machines" are chunks of molecules that require quantum mechanics to fully understand, and also tend to have a lot of issues with them. As an example of the weirdness, look at motor proteins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RUHJhskW00

It's amazing how utterly mad it all is, and yet not only does it work, our simple models of how it works have actually been helpful even though they were wrong. I mean, it's not like there's actually a single value in your DNA that is looked up by some "eyeball creation" machine when it determines the color of your eyes. Rather, there's a whole slew of genes that, when used as a map to build proteins and then, over a cascade of complex reactions, ends up with an eyeball that is also blue (and, additionally, probably more light sensitive, more tolerant to alcohol, and also more likely to have alcohol use disorder)

Source: work for genomenon.com which is like a search engine for genetic research papers)

Yes, amazing stuff:

(1) If we have a rock, can we expect slowly by small modifications to make it into a hammer?

(2) If we have a horse, can we expect slowly by small modifications to make it into a Model T?

(3) ... a mechanical adding machine into an iPhone?

(4) ... a log cabin into the Empire State Building?

(5) ... a pocket knife into a computer numerically controlled milling machine?

(6) ... any software from the earliest operating system or simplest application into to all the software we have now?

Especially for software, we believe that lots of little modifications will lead to technical debt, need for refactoring, to throwing out and starting over with a clean sheet of paper, to "plan to throw one away because you will anyway". In software, often it seems that there is no reasonable way to get from here to there and, instead, have to start over.

Well, with DNA, on this planet apparently the first version of life able to reproduce at all significantly was based on DNA, and all versions of life since then, including us, have also been based on DNA. Moreover we got here by small modifications of the DNA.

So, maybe the point is, DNA is not really life but just a design for a life, not a species but just a design for one. And we do believe that easily enough we could go to an architect and building engineer with standard tools for generating blue prints and doing the engineering for buildings, and they could use the same tools for a log cabin or a floating city.

Okay, but for life there hasn't been any design means, hasn't been any alternatives, other than just DNA.

Moreover, the simplest design tools for life have also been sufficient for the life to understand the design tools, life, the earth, and the universe.

Moreover, we are about the first, one of the first graduating classes of life that understands DNA, life, ..., and the universe: It's been about 14 billion years since the big bang, and our solar system was made about 5 billion years ago from the results of exploding stars that grew and exploded in the first 9 billion years which is not much longer than it took for the first stars to form and explode. So, apparently to get life able to understand the universe had to take about 14 billion years from the big bang and we are among the first instances of such life.

YMMV, but looks amazing to me!

Hmm ....

In no way can this explain any of the complexity of life, but, I found the DNA walk graphs very fascinating to look at anyway. You assign a direction to each letter (a=up, c=down, g=left, t=right) and plot pixels in a sequence.

For example: https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/139941708/bty1021...

There was also a partly functioning interactive at http://www.g-language.org/g3/ (click on DNA walk tab) and zoom in.

The code is simple, but the runtime is incredibly complex and every implementation is slightly different ;)

Gene sequences are easy. Methylation, expression, and protein folding are hard. You can sequence a human genome with a single computer in a day or two; sequencing generates about 30G of data. By contrast, protein folding has its own distributed crowdsourcing project (Folding@Home), with collected computational power of 98.7 petaflops, and it still has barely scratched the surface of our understanding for how specific proteins generate their biological effects.

Yes. Although it's important to note that mutation doesn't necessarily imply increased virulence. A blog post from This Week in Virology from a few days ago noted that the SARS epidemic may have actually been blunted due to a mutation it undertook.

There isn't a vaccine for either SARS or MERS, in part because they don't happen very often. In the case of SARS, that one outbreak was it so far, while in MERS we've seen a grand total of about 1500 people infected worldwide, although the disease is still circulating.