Scientist decries ‘chaotic’ conditions on cruise ship after viral outbreak
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
The mention that the Japanese government is allowing it's citizens to leave and use public transit seems like a very risky and foolhardy move.
While I'm certainly no expert, and I'd definitely hate to be stuck on that ship - I think Japan could surely have set up some kind of field isolation area in the last few weeks and get passengers off and isolated using proper quarantine protocols. The statement by Kentaro Iwata makes it clear that nobody with a background in infectious diseases was involved in setting up proper quarantine procedures onboard the ship.
"Japan lacks an agency like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, charged with applying research to public health ... NIID is focused on basic research."
An isolated outbreak on a cruise ship? That should be the bare minimum a country should handle. Note that Japan doesn't have any organization like the CDC- they aren't prepared for anything.
Doctor Kentaro Iwata is properly effed for speaking up.
If you've been paying attention for the last month or two, there are hundreds of anecdotal reports and videos all pointing toward the same grave conclusions - not to mention dozens of published (awaiting review) papers at this point and, increasingly, many if not most of the rumors from 1-2 months ago are gradually being confirmed. Look no further than China's unprecedented response to this outbreak - 700 million people are under lockdown and their GDP is effectively shut down.
Frankly, the modern media establishment's standards for proof are too high to adequately cover such a rapidly unfolding catastrophy when the majority of information has to come from unofficial leaks because ground zero is an authoritarian regime which controls what it's citizens can say amongst themselves and to the rest of the world. This epidemic is far worse than westerners currently seem to understand, and if it is not contained, the chaos that will grip the rest of the world will be truly awesome to behold. This is a virus which is at least as deadly as the infamous 1918 flu, likely more virulent (R0 estimates anywhere from 3 to 6+), and there is still no cure, though a paper was published on the 4th with chloroquine as a potential candidate. Plus, based on autoimmune reactions induced by all previously developed viable vaccine candidates for SARS and MERS, there is unlikely to be a vaccine for this coronavirus as well.
As I've been saying for a month now, we should not be panicking, but there's no excuse at this point not to be prepared. WSJ announced 5400 people in California are under quarantine today. 700 people in WA under supervision from authorities. Personally I'm moving to minimize my reliance on the government in the case that this pandemic spreads to the U.S. at large, based on the rank incompetence that we see in government activities on a frequent basis.
Honestly watching so many average people dismiss 2019-ncov has been a fascinating exposé on the potential for centralized information control in free speech societies - if you're a 3 letter agency and you want something to disappear from public consciousness, just preemptively leak the story to "questionable" sources and suddenly the media won't report on it and people will balk at you for posting junk sources. What a world we live in!
I was curious about the source for this so I searched and found this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-has-u-s-cities-stre...
It states the 5400 Californians are under "self quarantine", as opposed to the Washington State enforced quarantine of 700.
I think the problem with the media though isn't what you're suggesting. We seem to be seeing a simple lack of basic research skills in many media outlets. Being able to go through a lot of real time media sources, separate truth from fiction, and build up a synthesis should be the basic qualification for a journalist these days - and probably would be, except the job no longer pays enough for the people who build up that kind of skill set.
Can't see the chaos though. There is a lot of spare capacity these days.
"The result indicates that the ACE2 virus receptor expression is concentrated in a small population of type II alveolar cells (AT2). Surprisingly, we found that this population of ACE2-expressing AT2 also highly expressed many other genes that positively regulating viral reproduction and transmission. A comparison between eight individual samples demonstrated that the Asian male one has an extremely large number of ACE2-expressing cells in the lung."
Which is disturbing all the same, but it means the fatality rate will be lower among non-Asians, unless the disease mutates further, which is very possible.
* It is unknown if ACE2 is the only important receptor * Study doesn't actually count the amount of ACE2 receptors, just the amount of RNA expression (ok, you can probably hand wave this limitation away) * Study also shows a difference of expression ratio of 1.6% vs 0.4% in males vs females (n=2 vs n=6) * There was a SINGLE asian male in the data set
Given these limitations of the original paper, at the very least, I would say that you should shy away from definitive statements until stronger evidence appears.
The top comment on biorxiv ran with some of the ideas from the paper, and looked at a more general and larger data set and found no statistically significant difference between Asian and Caucasian lung tissue samples in terms of ACE2 expression when measured in bulk (see https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5cb4b2c5e1ae3cf8454e870...)
That said, it's certainly a cool paper.
From my understanding of statistics and biology this is not significant at all then.
Here are two excerpts I am basing my summary on:
Two-thirds of the men smoked; there was little dependence of male smoking prevalence on age, but many smokers had not smoked cigarettes throughout adult life. Comparing men born before and since 1950, in the older generation, the age at which smoking had started was later and, particularly in rural areas, lifelong exclusive cigarette use was less common than in the younger generation.
Women were included only in the second study. Of 302 669 women enrolled in 2004–08, only 3·2% were ever regular smokers, including 0·5% who stopped by choice. Smoking uptake decreased steeply across successive generations of women.
No, they are not. 700M are under reporting requirements, meaning they need to record entry and exit to some buildings. Actual lockdowns (can't leave your home outside schedule or without permission) affect a much smaller if admittedly still enormous population of around 100M.
The reason traditional media and other authoritative sources are so reluctant to post speculation is to avoid spreading unwarranted panic. Right now, Influenza is a far bigger risk to the average person, and less than half of Americans bother to get vaccinated.
I can't say whether or not it's working, but I haven't caught the flu since I started getting vaccinated.
(I edited my previous post to clarify)
What else would should they be telling people?