Lab ferrets

The internet is a great collective mind, and processes a great number of ideas. Someone remembered news of criminal trials of Chinese lab workers selling lab animals in the local wet market. It was not in Wuhan, but knowing China, it stands to reason that the large biowarfare lab in the center of the town, two blocks away from the market, was supplying live and dead lab animals.

I posed a question in Greg Cochran's blog: Will the coronavirus evolve to a more or to a less virulent form? Natural selection will favour the lines that infect faster and more effectively, and that means ambulant and coughing carriers. Those lines that send the carriers to the bed or kill them, survive less. So the tendency, I reason, is the corona virus gradually turning into a common seasonal flu. Let's see what is Greg's opinion.   

Winding down the corona epidemic

Several teams in Israel are building models how to end the economic disaster of the corona epidemic lockdown.

Bar-Ilan University researchers led by Dr. Baruch Barzel of the Department of Mathematics, have devised a strategy based on alternating lockdowns: first splitting the population into two groups, then alternating these groups between lockdown and routine activity in weekly succession.
The official team that is dealing with this problem includes the Ministry of Health and the Treasury, and the Modeling and Prediction Unit of the Mossad (I didn't know of its existence). Their solution is gradually freeing up the industries that employ much manpower and pay low salaries, to avoid mass unemployment (which is almost irreversible), and the high tech sector. Tourism, restaurants, entertainment, aviation, etc. are to be left to the end. One of the reasons to lift asap the lockdown is the possible increase of social tensions between economic classes and ethnias.

Vengeful Germans

Der Spiegel does not hide its Schadenfreude: 

 Donald Trump's disastrous crisis management makes the United States the new epicenter of the pandemic. The country is facing an unprecedented economic crash. Is the world experiencing the implosion of a superpower?

Mass Graves in New York

Long trenches in Hart Island (near Staten Island) being excavated for the coronavirus epidemic victims. And the malignant blogger world was searching for trenches in Iran, schadenfreude. Now no one is laughing. It is frightening. 

Working in Captivity

No one is allowed in the street. My downtown corner is deserted, there is a strange silence, the air is pure and the pidgeons are seeking where to nest. I am clearing up my contract debts, like preparing a clean autocad scheme of the flowchart of a large wet food factory. What are all those pipes? Which is connected to which machine? The factory has dozens of Gordian pipe knots like the pic. There is no one to ask because they don't answer the phone and because no one knows. I left this to the end, and now the deadline has been reached. I finish and hopefully get paid for the whole project. I know that if I focus for a few hours I can do it, but focusing is extremely hard work and I prefer to blog. Oy! J,  if you keep distracting yourself blogging, you will lose the payment. J, think of all that money!

Virus spreading through vent pipes

There was a famous case of a 50 storey residential building where people in different stages infected each other - apparently by aerosols dispersed through sewage vents.  That happened a decade ago - the SARS virus that caused 342 confirmed cases and 42 deaths in the complex. The virus was transported by air droplets escaping from dry U bends (siphons) and negative pressure in the bathrooms caused by extractor ventilators. See the interactive graph above. The interconnectedness of the sewage system not only in the same building but between nearby complexes (such as hospitals) facilitates the dispersion of pathogens. Recently the Lancet recommended (1) investigate the sources of sewage odors, (2) maintain the U bends full all the time opening the tap twice a day for 5 minutes.  

Boris Johnson in Respirator Machine

I am feeling sad for Boris and his unborn child. England is now ruled by Raab, a distant relative of mine. Our is the Orthodox branch while his parents were Bolsheviks.

This coronavirus epidemy occupies my mind. Now it seems to me obvious that the Chinese government's immediate, brutal (and successful) reaction to a  handful of atypical flu cases in Wuhan in January was caused by the knowledge that it was a biowar virus escaped from the Chinese Central Biowar Labs in Wuhan. It was an accident, for sure.

On the other hand, epidemics are nothing new, one killed a third of all Europeans and no one created it. So it is almost certain that this one is also natural.