Covid-19 (Coronavirus) - Please stay safe, y'all


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Djoga'Ro said:
If I got it right now, changes to the virus mostly happen during self-assembly after copying. ?

Interesting, but to circle back: more hosts => more new viruses. And thus infecting every healthy human, might result in catastrophe at some to-be-considered probability, I'd assume.
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Thanks, that was a good read. Unfortunatley, looking through the linked pages only tells me that antigenic drift gets exposed by the copying process, but must have happened before, and the other two types of generic change I've not got to grips with determining for sure that they don't documented the virus process in detail, but I think they don't. But certainly antigenic drift is desribed as happening before copying, which is before assembly. Maybe it could still happen during assembly and then go round and infect a different cell and only be exposed when it's copied there, but I think it's more likely that is happens in one of the other numerous stages in the virus lifecycle that presede the copying stage a little more closely.

Either way, it seems to me that if the virus is only infecting healthy humans, those humans would kill the virus including all of its evolved brethren pretty promptly. It's only if one of those evolutions caused the virus's shell to change enough for it not to be recognised by our immune systems, and it became suddenly more dangerous as an infection so that that person couldn't cope with it and spread it further, and I think that's unlikely given how quickly it is spotted and eliminated in a matter of days by the people it infects.

I'm still not convinced this is an actual good idea even if we actually knew all of the people that wouldn't be badly affected by it, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
 
Yeah, they don't really describe, where those forms of mutation can happen. I landed on "during assembly', because that's the only point in the cycle, where they mention change to the virus.
I'm heavily leaning on the statement "Viral populations do not grow through cell division, because they are acellular. Instead, they use the machinery and metabolism of a host cell to produce multiple copies of themselves, and they assemble in the cell." and my assumption, that without that activity there's far less chance for change, and my lack of imagination, how a single virion that might have "acconplished" evolutionary change could succeed in propagation without having a host at the ready to multiply it.

levi said:
Either way, it seems to me that if the virus is only infecting healthy humans, those humans would kill the virus including all of its evolved brethren pretty promptly. It's only if one of those evolutions caused the virus's shell to change enough for it not to be recognised by our immune systems, and it became suddenly more dangerous as an infection so that that person couldn't cope with it and spread it further, and I think that's unlikely given how quickly it is spotted and eliminated in a matter of days by the people it infects.
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Mostly I'm with you there, but new virus signatures do emerge all the time (at least on a large scale (the flu needs a new vaccine annually (and I don't know, if it's one new signature or several))) and I cannot help but see the best chances for it to happen within hosts. ?

levi said:
it's an interesting thought experiment
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+

Nintendo said:
Every man and his/her dog is buying toilet paper here in Australia :(
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Fine Aussies you are. Crocodile Dundee wouldn't need toilet paper. ;)
 
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Never let a good crisis go to waste... for those who don't have ears to listen: Mandatory vaccination if you want to travel.
 
As Announced in the Coronavirus Subreddit there is a puzzling game called Foldit available for Linux, Mac and Windows where you can help designing a Protein for the Coronavirus. The Protein will neutralize the protein spikes of the Coronavirus and thus prevent the virus from interacting with human cells. The protein can not be entirely calculated (especially the "folding" process) with even the best computers of today so they are calling for gamers to help them out.

You can play the tutorial levels offline and see if you like it. To play the Coronavirus level (or the beginner Coronavirus level if you need a basic idea of how the solution may look like, enable the listing of beginner level inside the game when choosing a level and search for it) however you have to register an account, although you still should play the tutorials in order to understand how the game works. I recommend having the wiki pages right next to the game if things are unclear. Have a look in the wiki for "The Science" caption on the right sidebar and "Tools, tips, techniques" or "Featured articles" captions otherwise for quick references. Probably Protein Structures on Wikipedia might be worth reading (or at least the picture). So far this is all you need for playing foldit. I for myself played Foldit for a few days, so I just started getting my hands dirty with the Coronavirus level.

If sound is not working for you on Linux, run it with padsp ./Foldit. Foldit uses OSS instead of PulseAudio.

If you want a quick picture of the Corona beginner level, here it is in the spoiler:
Foldit - Coronavirus Beginner Level.png

Edit: the Corona puzzle 1805b expired, but they published a new Corona puzzle (1808) shortly after the expiration. The difference is basically some objectives and other improvements in the level. Whatever solution you had in the previous level can be loaded in the new level.
 
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Djoga'Ro said:
Mostly I'm with you there, but new virus signatures do emerge all the time (at least on a large scale (the flu needs a new vaccine annually (and I don't know, if it's one new signature or several))) and I cannot help but see the best chances for it to happen within hosts. ?
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Flu, like other RNA viruses apparently exist as a variety of different evolved types in the wild. I dare say this probably applies to Covid-19 or SARS2 or whatever we're calling it now already, given how widely it's spread and for how long. The health authorities research what's likely to be in the country next winter, and manufacture gimped* strains of that to be used to immunise people.

Of course, viruses mutate within hosts - it's where they live, be that a human host, or a pig or apparently now, bats and things. Outside of that largely benign environment any change is likely to be unsustainably dramatic, while anything that effectively resorts the genome or changes one nucleotide for another is likely to be something that happens due to cell activity. But the virus lifecycle consists of at least 6 stages, often more, and it's not clear to me largely from reading wikipedia exactly which of these candidate stages most types of genome change are likely to happen.

*Medical term, I've been assured.
 
The situation in Sweden can now be tracked even closer to realtime through https://c19.se/ . I guess someone got fed up with waiting for WHO to update their statistics, which for Sweden has been lagging behind our official reports, sometimes by as much as a day. I don't know how many Swedes we have in here but I figured I'd post it somewhere since I didn't know about it until a friend linked it to me.

Unfortunately we're becoming a perfect example of why we can't keep accepting people traveling back in without screening and only follow up when someone becomes suspiciously ill.

Our public health minister said a week ago that we had nothing to worry about because we had 100 available hospital beds in case COVID-19 starts spreading. That statement didn't age too well since we have 94 cases now and the hospitals started having trouble keeping up a few days ago. He also started coughing into his hands right above the water glasses during a TV panel interview yesterday. This was a week after he also said you should cough into the bend of your arm. Now that people are pointing out that he didn't follow his own advice, he publicly stated he's being bullied by right wing extremists because someone cut out that part of the video (which is available for free from our national broadcasting network website) and reposted it online, which then went viral.
 
The UK seemed to be doing quite well in quarantining people that came back from China early on, but didn't stop people coming back from northern italy, which is where it's spreading from now it seems. Perhaps the numbers coming back from Italy were too great, I don't have any stats on that, but it means it's popping up in pockets all over the country now.
 
levi said:
The UK seemed to be doing quite well in quarantining people that came back from China early on, but didn't stop people coming back from northern italy, which is where it's spreading from now it seems. Perhaps the numbers coming back from Italy were too great, I don't have any stats on that, but it means it's popping up in pockets all over the country now.
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Same happened in India, a group of Italian tourist visited India, 15 of them are now confirmed cases. They travelled for about 1 week before one of them fell seriously ill, and that group was screened. More cases will soon start to pop up now.
 
In times of Christ, they did not have toilet paper either. They used stones, those smooth ones we use to toss into lakes to bounce of the water. In the story of Goliath against David, David actually used those flat stones, to add insult to (deadly) injury.
 
FBnil said:
In times of Christ, they did not have toilet paper either. They used stones, those smooth ones we use to toss into lakes to bounce of the water. In the story of Goliath against David, David actually used those flat stones, to add insult to (deadly) injury.
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Is that true? Where did you read that?
 
Dr. λ the Typer of Terms said:
Is that true? Where did you read that?
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Then he took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd's bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine. 1 Samuel 17:40 (NIV)
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It's THE thing that gives kids a chuckle during cathequesis.

This one gives you an idea:
www.pristinesprays.com

The History of Butt Wiping: What Did People Use Before Toilet Paper?

For nearly all of history, humans from all periods of time have wiped using the “closest smooth-ish object” method (i.e., identify the closest object that is relatively smooth and wipe). The Romans, Victorians, and even cowboys have had their fair share of using obscure tools to wipe. It was not...
www.pristinesprays.com www.pristinesprays.com

So if you see broken greek pottery and archeologist digging that up... well...
 
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