Controlavirus

[BIAD]

I think it's time to put your dumb-down hat on around now as the BBC wishes to talk to you.

They write it like this instead of quoting the Los Alamos findings (it says where the virus came from!) because of
-what I suggest, are the specific infection duration and the need to keep the fear going.

Coronavirus mutations: Scientists puzzle over impact.



'Researchers in the US and UK have identified hundreds of mutations to the virus which causes the disease Covid-19.
But none has yet established what this will mean for virus spread in the population and for how effective a vaccine might
be. Viruses mutate - it's what they do.

The question is: which of these mutations actually do anything to change the severity or infectiousness of the disease?
Preliminary research from the US has suggested one particular mutation - D614G - is becoming dominant and could
make the disease more infectious.

It hasn't yet been reviewed by other scientists and formally published.

The researchers, from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, have been tracking changes to the "spike"
of the virus that gives it its distinctive shape, using a database called the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data
(GISAID). They noted there seems to be something about this particular mutation that makes it grow more quickly
- but the consequences of this are not yet clear.

The research team analysed UK data from coronavirus patients in Sheffield. Although they found people with that particular
mutation of the virus seemed to have a larger amount of the virus in their samples, they didn't find evidence that those
people became sicker or stayed in hospital for longer.

'Mutations not a bad thing'
Another study from University College London (UCL) identified 198 recurring mutations to the virus.
One of its authors, Professor Francois Balloux, said: "Mutations in themselves are not a bad thing and there is nothing to
suggest SARS-CoV-2 is mutating faster or slower than expected.

"So far, we cannot say whether SARS-CoV-2 is becoming more or less lethal and contagious.
A study from the University of Glasgow, which also analysed mutations, said these changes did not amount to different strains
of the virus. They concluded that only one type of the virus is currently circulating.

Monitoring small changes to the structure of the virus is important in understanding the development of vaccines.
Take the 'flu virus: it mutates so fast that the vaccine has to be adjusted every year to deal with the specific strain in circulation.

Drug development
Many of the Covid-19 vaccines currently in development target the distinctive spikes of the virus - the idea is that getting your
body to recognise a unique element of the spike will help it to fight off the whole virus. But if that spike is changing, a vaccine
developed this way could become less effective.
At the moment this is all theoretical. Scientists don't yet have enough information to say what changes to the virus's genome
will mean.

Dr Lucy van Dorp, UCL study co-author, said being able to analyse a large number of virus genomes could be "invaluable to
drug development efforts". However, she told the BBC: "I love genomes, but there is only so much they can say."...'

BBC:
.........................................

High Contagiousness and Rapid Spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the etiologic agent of the current rapidly growing outbreak
of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), originating from the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.

Initially, 41 cases of “pneumonia of unknown etiology” were reported to the World Health Organization by the Wuhan Municipal
Health Committee at the end of December 2019. On January 8, 2020, the pathogen was identified, and human-to-human
transmission was reported soon after.

By January 21, most provinces of China had reported COVID-19 cases. By March 16, the outbreak had led to >170,000 total
confirmed cases and >6,500 deaths globally. In a period of 3 months, an outbreak of apparent idiopathic pneumonia had
become the COVID-19 pandemic...'

(Full text in link.)

Results.
The time from symptom onset to hospitalization to discharge or death.
Our estimate of the time from initial exposure to symptom onset (i.e., the incubation period) is 4.2 days (95% CI 3.5–5.1 days).
This estimated duration is generally consistent with a recent report by Guan et al. showing that the median incubation period is
4 days.

Our estimate is ≈1 day shorter than 2 previous estimates (1,11). One potential caveat of our estimation is that because most of the
case reports we collected were from the first few persons detected in each province, this estimation might be biased toward patients
with more severe symptoms if they are more likely to be detected.

The time from symptom onset to hospitalization showed evidence of time dependence.
Before January 18, the time from symptom onset to hospitalization was 5.5 days (95% CI 4.6–6.6 days), whereas after January 18,
the duration shortened significantly to 1.5 days (95% CI 1.2–1.9 days).

The change in the distribution coincides with news reports of potential human-to-human transmission and upgrading of emergency
response level to Level 1 by the China CDC. The emerging consensus about the risk for COVID-19 probably led to substantial
behavior changes among symptomatic persons, in terms of seeking more timely medical care during this period.

However, because most of the individual reports were collected in provinces other than Hubei, the change in durations might only
reflect changes in the rest of China (rather than in Hubei). We also found that the time from initial hospital admittance to discharge
was 11.5 days (95% CI 8.0–17.3 days) and from initial hospital admittance to death was 11.2 days (95% CI 8.7–14.9 days).
The time from symptom onset to death was estimated to be 16.1 days (95% CI 13.1–20.2 days)...'

Acknowledgments
We thank Alan Perelson, Christiaan van Dorp, and Ruy Ribeiro for suggestions and critical reading of the manuscript and Weili Yin
for help with collecting and translating documents from provincial health commission websites...'

CDC Link:

Notice in the BBC article they quote 'Dr. Lucy van Dorp' from UCL (University College London) and yet oddly enough in the CDC's
article above, 'Christiaan van Dorp' is acknowledged. Strange, unless you recall that the BBC must promote female's in this type
of research and that's she a contributor to the BBC.