“Clever girl” - TTG

It’s a phrase used in countless TV and movie scenes. I find it an apt phrase to describe this particular coronavirus, even though most don’t consider that protein wrapped string of RNA to be sentient. Unlike Ebola or HIV, this coronavirus is not extremely deadly to its host, but it has a far more efficient and effective strategy for infection. This story from France illustrates the cleverness of this virus.

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(Reuters) - A French hospital which has retested old samples from pneumonia patients discovered that it treated a man who had COVID-19 as early as Dec. 27, nearly a month before the French government confirmed its first cases. Yves Cohen, head of resuscitation at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals in the northern suburbs of Paris, told BFM TV that scientists had retested samples from 24 patients treated in December and January who tested negative for the flu. "Of the 24, we had one who was positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 27," he told the news channel on Sunday.

The samples had all initially been collected to detect flu using PCR tests, the same genetic screening process that can also be used to detect the presence of the novel coronavirus in patients infected at the time the sample is collected. Each sample was retested several times to ensure there were no errors, he added. Neither Cohen nor his team were immediately available for comment on Monday.

France, which has seen almost 25,000 people die from the virus since March 1, confirmed its first three COVID-19 cases on Jan. 24, including two patients in Paris and another in the southwestern city of Bordeaux.

Cohen said it was too early to know if the patient whose Dec. 27 test was COVID-19 positive is France's "patient zero". Knowing who was the first is critical to understanding how the virus spread. Cohen said the patient had survived and that a first investigation to trace the first contamination has been carried out. "He was sick for 15 days and infected his two children, but not his wife, who works in a supermarket.  (Reuters)

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Just as we’ve found the covid-1 virus has been circulating in the US longer than we first thought, the same is true in Europe. Who knows how long it was  silently circulating in China before making its presence known in Wuhan. Paris Match has a story about how this “patient zero” case in France may have found its way from China. 

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“The patient in question has not traveled to Wuhan, the cradle of the epidemic in China, and does not know how he may have been infected. He transmitted the virus to his two children but not to his wife. Doctor Yves Cohen raised the possibility that the latter had contracted the virus at her workplace, the fishmonger's supermarket, and had developed the disease asymptomatically before transmitting it to her husband. After having thought for a while that she had been able to handle fish of Chinese origin, the doctors learned "by chance" that she worked alongside sushi vendors, some of whom were of Chinese origin.”  (Paris Match)

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This asymptomatic infection is widespread as we’re finding out and is a key factor in the evolutionary success of the virus. If all the virus did was spread wildly throughout the host population (that means us) with little effect, there would be nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, it is devastating to a small percent of the population affecting a wide variety of bodily functions. Still manageable. However, what are the long-term effects of asymptomatic infections? We won’t know for a while whether these asymptomatic infections cause long-term damage in their hosts’ pulmonary, vascular, immunological and/or neurological systems. Clever girl, indeed.

TTG  

https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN22G20L

https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/Sante/Coronavirus-un-premier-cas-en-France-des-le-27-decembre-selon-un-professeur-1684176

Comments

[Rick James Merlotti]

Girl? That's sexist!

Kidding...

[Deap]

You made a very good case for Covid-19 anti-body testing, which is now more widely available, whether you have to pay for it out of pocket or not. We need a wider data pool. Too much damage already been triggered based upon lack of data and lack of scientific literacy; but unfortunately a surfeit of partisan political weaponizing.

"Do you want to be safe or do you want to die" is not the right question we should still be asking at this point. Or letting others put those words into our mouths.

(NB:: be sure to not self-inoculate by sticking one's own fingers into one's own mouth, nose and/or eyes. Still a no-no to stick anything potentially contaminated into our own mouths)

The Rise of the Screaming Harridan Karens is the scariest part of this virus meltdown so far. They lurk in grocery stores ready to pounce is you even remotely violate "their space". Is this what 'women's liberation" did for us?

What lives will these proliferating Karens have once Covid-19 passes on to becoming just one more slightly abnormal flu season? Camus certainly gave us clues The Plague - finding life and meaning in the transitory world feeding off other's miseries.

[exiled off mainstreet]

The early date of the infection, especially considering it probably took some time, maybe two or three weeks, for the pneumonia to develop actually may cast some doubt on the accepted Chinese origins story of the virus. Other tested materials from patients in other parts of Europe, and in the US need to be reexamined to justify the assumptions being made.

[The Twisted Genius]

exiled off mainstreet,

We also don't know how long this was stewing in China and in what strain. It may have been asymptomatic before it started sickening and killing people.

[turcopolier]

TTG

To shut down and nearly destroy the economy was a foolish and infantile reaction to danger. Old people like you and me should have taken shelter and our chances as we personally always did before. Since when has the "greater good" ceased to be the iron principle of rationality? One of the reasons I put up the two snippets from my WBS fiction was as an illustration of how much better people our ancestors were.

[exiled off mainstreet]

I fully concur. The deaths resulting from the economic damage and deaths from direct collateral damage of the lockdowns will be exponentially greater than the deaths from the virus. TTG's point is also a valid one.

[Charles Schulte]

Need to search the internet for articles on strange disease from VAPING, read about the flu like symptoms and the attack on the lungs. Doctors were saying they had never scene before, thought it was something the people were adding to the vape. Suddenly you do not hear about it anymore. Hum

[will.271828]

let's play devil's advocate contra to the Manatee narrative:

It's all the ChiComms fault for scaring the whole world to death. All that building a 10,000 bed hospital in ten days, welding people shut to enforce quarantines, all that mask wearing. Surely all that stuff was to entice and incite the rest of the world into over-reacting and shutting down the world economy! Cui bono? They've now got cheap oil and are gobbling marked down equities, aren't they? Fiendish design.

[Fred]

"...what are the long-term effects of asymptomatic infections?"

A rising public awareness of the lack of integrity of carreer officials at yet another 3 letter federal agency. In the short term it serves as yet another excuse for draconian state policies that will result in the destruction of the economy and thus the Republic. Meanwhile there is plenty of money to be made:

"The COVID-19 Treatment Panel of NIH evaded disclosure of the massive financial links of its members to Gilead Sciences, the manufacturer of a competing drug remdesivir. Among those who failed to disclose such links are 2 out of 3 of its co-chairs."
Original source: https://meaninginhistory.blogspot.com/2020/05/some-good-covid-reads.html

How dare you use this forbidden cure:
"COVID-19 Patients Given Unproven Drug In Texas Nursing Home In 'Disconcerting' Move"https://www.npr.org/2020/04/10/830348837/covid-19-patients-given-unproven-drug-in-texas-nursing-home-garnering-criticism

"Nearly 20% of this panel is employed by or has investment interests in Gilead."
My, imagine that.
https://aidsinfo.nih.gov/contentfiles/lvguidelines/glchunk/glchunk_274.pdf

I'm sure the Basement Barrier will keep Biden safe throughout the fray of competing naratives until the election can be rigged in favor of a maleable politician not suffering from dimentia nor having a backbone.

[Yeah, Right]

TTG, the question you pose about asymptomatic spread was also asked by Anderson in the article that killed off the "genetically-modified" argument: …"we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer."

If (i) then it is all but certain that the virus jumped species in Wuhan, and people then started presenting to the hospital almost immediatelyafter.

If (ii) then it could have passed over into the human genepool years ago, anywhere, and Wuhan's importance is merely that it was where the virus first mutated into something deadly.

There are going to be more of these revelations as respiratory physicians test old samples. It will only take one positive result dated 2018 or early-2019 to put paid to the "It escaped from that Wuhan Lab" argument.

I think Mike Pompeo is being very foolish to push that claim as aggressively as he has, precisely because every blood sample in a minus-80 freezer anywhere in the world is a potential hand grenade ready to blow up in his face.

[Yeah, Right]

will.271828 the problem with that argument is that it assumes that the Chinese were able to conceive and carry out a fiendish Fu-Manchu plot within a matter of days.

As in: they could not have predicted an outbreak, but when one appeared they took advantage of it by immediately enacting the biggest and most elaborate psych-op that the world has ever seen. And got away with it.

Brainiac could not have done better.

It requires a level of efficiency and cunning that, in all honesty, goes beyond "devil's advocacy" and into the realm of "comix book supervillainy".

[Godfree Roberts]

Trump's top health official and Human Genome hero, Dr. Francis Collins. Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, said the virus might have been spreading quietly in humans for years, or even decades, without causing a detectable outbreak. Dr. Collins, a physician-geneticist, is noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH from 1993-2008. Before coming to NIH, Dr. Collins was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Michigan. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007, and received the National Medal of Science in 2009.

[turcopolier]

Godfree Roberts

"the virus might have been spreading quietly in humans for years, or even decades, without causing a detectable outbreak." Quite possible. This only adds to the possibility that the population is far more widely infected than Faucirx thinks but less mortally. Are you going to give us your pedigree as well?

[Terence Gore]

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.29.069054v1.full.pdf

clever clever girls

Summary
We have developed an analysis pipeline to facilitate real-time mutation tracking in SARS-CoV-2,
focusing initially on the Spike (S) protein because it mediates infection of human cells and is the
target of most vaccine strategies and antibody-based therapeutics. To date we have identified
fourteen mutations in Spike that are accumulating. Mutations are considered in a broader
phylogenetic context, geographically, and over time, to provide an early warning system to
reveal mutations that may confer selective advantages in transmission or resistance to
interventions. Each one is evaluated for evidence of positive selection, and the implications of
the mutation are explored through structural modeling. The mutation Spike D614G is of urgent
concern; it began spreading in Europe in early February, and when introduced to new regions it
rapidly becomes the dominant form. Also, we present evidence of recombination between
locally circulating strains, indicative of multiple strain infections. These finding have important
implications for SARS-CoV-2 transmission, pathogenesis and immune interventions.

[Artemesia]

@ Fred, re Gilead: A billboard in my (mixed-income, high % POC) neighborhood motivated research into that Pharma firm: The billboard depicts a young Black male holding a rainbow umbrella; text says in Big Bold: "Love Passionately." Smaller letters advise: take PrEP, (it might say something about financial assistance available).

The PrEP regimen involves Gilead's drug Truveda
https://www.truvada.com/how-to-get-truvada-for-prep/truvada-cost
Gilead has donated thousands of the pills to the federal gov, but government pays for the required prescription/distribution/monitoring by physicians, and a cost multiples of times the cost of the pills.

Here we have Gilead encouraging risky behavior and advertising its drug to curb the effects of that behavior, at taxpayer expense.
Fauci's involvement with HIV Aids is highly controversial.

Same Fauci, in league with Gates, is behind a lockdown forcing un-sick, not-risk-taking persons to abstain from normal life functions, then advising the use of a drug produced by Gilead to cure that not-so-virulent disease.

It stinks.

PS Africans are using the herb Artemisia to combat Covid 19. You may have the plant in your front garden, as I do: it's also known as Silvermound or Wormwood.

[Master Slacker]

I think we have the perfect coming attraction to make her a star: Space Force

[stueeeeee]

First, the source of the virus was the Chinese wet market. Remember bat soup. Then, the Chinese claimed the US Army brought the virus. Now, the virus has been around "for years, even decades". Yeah, right.

Of course, the only thing we definitively "know" or are being told that we "know" is that it is a naturally derived virus...little else. A naturally occurring virus that scared world leaders to shut everything down. Heck, even to inquire if the virus is bioengineered is dismissed without a thought. It is unlikely we will ever know for at least a couple of decades the virus's likely unnatural origins...like the H1N1. If the Chinese and its sympathizers have any say, we will never know.

Funny the "clever girl" quote came from a movie where scientists genetically reincarnated dinosaurs.

[Jose]

This timeline fits in with an earlier spread from the lab:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/05/02/leaked-intelligence-report-details-chinas-blatant-coronavirus-coverup-n2568064

WHO really screwed up by taking China's side of the story, many see it as cover-up.

The cover-up makes it hard to control the hardcore elements.

BTW, I also own GILEAD stock. lol

[Yeah, Right]

Jose, that document has been disowned by both the Australian intelligence community and their British equivalent, which means that two of the Five Eyes are saying the report is a load of bollocks.

And it is.

Note this howler:
December 6, 2019
"Five days after a man linked to Wuhan’s seafood market presented pneumonia-like symptoms, his wife contracts it, suggesting human to human transmission."

The author can not back that statement up.

"his wife contracts it"? Really? Or did they mean that she presented to the hospital five days after he did?

How, exactly, did they determine when she was infected (i.e. "contracts it")?

Starts to show symptoms, yes, that can be known to the day.

But "contracts it"? Really? What if the man had gone to the market to, you know, buy something to eat, and the wife eats it?

That sentence is sloppy writing. Very sloppy. If that is a verbatim line from the report then it was written by a hack.

[Yeah, Right]

"Of course, the only thing we definitively "know" or are being told that we "know" is that it is a naturally derived virus...little else. "

Agreed. This paper published in Nature appears to have put paid to all "genetically-modified" theories.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

Beyond that everything is still speculation.

"Heck, even to inquire if the virus is bioengineered is dismissed without a thought."

No, not "without a thought". The paper in Nature has put paid to competing arguments.

To continue with that line of inquiry is now akin to searching for fairies at the bottom of your garden.

Sure, you can do it. Go right ahead, nobody will stop you.

But the US IC and Mike Pompeo aren't going to join you on your fairy-quest because they have concluded that you are looking for something that isn't there, and they've got better things to do.

"If the Chinese and its sympathizers have any say, we will never know."

I don't agree with that. The geneticists and the epidemiologists are in a race to determine if the virus was already "deadly to humans" in bats before it made the jump to humans, or if it made the jump to humans a while ago and then mutated into its current, deadly form.

One way or another that question will be answered, and the Chinese are not going to be able to stop them.

[JJackson]

Terence
I think the S D614G mutation is a red hearing, which has come up before with claims of higher virulence. This mutation occurred right at the beginning of the outbreak and split the phylogenic tree into two halves. Most of the the early Wuhan/Hubei sequences were of type D and they seeded the early Washing State and other West coast cases. The G strain however seeded the first French, Italian and East Coast sequences which subsequently caused the widest spread and have been the most heavily sequenced. Both strains are holding their own and neither is displacing the other and there is no statistical evidence that one is spreading faster, or is more virulent than the other. There have been 3 million plus confirmed cases but only about 5000 sequences and these are very heavily skewed towards the richer western nations (which happen to be on the S branch) and some countries disproportionally sequence more than others e.g there are 82 from Luxembourg but 62 from Italy.

All
Every sequence found to date fit neatly on the tree showing they all came from one source. If the virus had been circulating in humans before Nov/Dec last year then they have not been sequenced and have not played any part in the observed pandemic. They may have been circulating in a poorly adapted form, to humans, and then acquired some mutations that made them far better adapted and exploded. The sequence data makes it unlikely that they are happily circulating in any animal that might be found in wet markets or there would have been further introductions to humans which would show up as a new branch on the phylogenic tree, as there must have been on-going mutations in that reservoir, independent of the mutations found on the human tree. All of this points to a single introduction from a source that has limited contact with humans and is poorly sampled. My best guess is if we sample bat caves, so we have thousands of bat sequences, we will find the reservoir.

[Fred]

Artemesia,

So controversial he kept his job for four decades running.

[Terence Gore]

J Jackson

It may well be. I really don't know. My main worry is that this is a biologic weapon and has been introduced. My secondary worry is the virus has the capability to go latent in the host and reemerge. If that is possible the reopening of the country is sure to bring a second wave.

[JJackson]

Terence
Why it is not a bio-weapon is very difficult to explain but we humans do not have enough knowledge, yet, to be able to predict what effect any given change will have. We can engineer changes but to find out what effect they will have we would have to infect large numbers of people and observe them under controlled conditions. This virus has thousands of changes from the nearest known sequence and the Wuhan lab has non-Chinese researchers, including Americans, working in it.
If your second concern is that it may lay dormant in humans and then reemerge I think that is very unlikely in a corona virus. There are retroviruses that can do that but it is not a feature of CoVs. Where the danger lies is in the fact we have taken a virus, endemic to a bat cave in China, and spread it all over the globe giving it the opportunity to find another non-human host which it would never have encountered naturally. If it finds a home in an African bat or American racoon it may become endemic in that species and then start new pandemics in years to come, after it has adapted to a point where any immunity we have to SARS-2 will not protect us from SARS-3 or 4.

[Yeah, Right]

Some very serious pushback by the Aussie intelligence officials and diplomats regarding that "Five-Eyes" report:
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-concern-over-us-spreading-unfounded-claims-about-wuhan-lab-20200506-p54qhp.html

That Mike Pompeo, what a character, always playing those practical jokes on his pals!