Re: Coronavirus data and events as they come in

[Suu]

We have a case at Naval Station Mayport, where I live. My guess that means that the sailor's entire command was exposed, which means the base, which means housing, which means the commissary.

On that note, I fucking hate you all, and I want to be cremated.

[Juana]

Rand Paul had tested positive for Coronavirus now, if only he started showing symptoms, we'd be set.

[Cain]

If only he were 20 years older.

[Juana]

Yeah, alright, he probably won't die of the virus but I'd accept showing them for schadenfreude.

[Cramulus]

the stimulus bill that the democrats just blocked --- it handled the cash payouts to citizens as an advance on a future tax refund. So essentially, Mitch is giving us the opportunity to borrow from our future selves. It's money you would otherwise receive in April 2021.

The gov could choose to handle these payouts as a "gift", but then you've gotta pay taxes on it - possibly as high as 40%.

https://electionopinions.com/2020/03/21/mitch-mcconnells-dirty-double-cross-on-stimulus-checks

[Doktor Howl]

the stimulus bill that the democrats just blocked --- it handled the cash payouts to citizens as an advance on a future tax refund. So essentially, Mitch is giving us the opportunity to borrow from our future selves. It's money you would otherwise receive in April 2021.

The gov could choose to handle these payouts as a "gift", but then you've gotta pay taxes on it - possibly as high as 40%.

https://electionopinions.com/2020/03/21/mitch-mcconnells-dirty-double-cross-on-stimulus-checks

Yeah, it's like Bush 43's "advance rebate."

[Juana]

If that's how it goes down, I can't afford to take them and neither can anyone else. I can't wait for this slow motion suicide to finally fucking end, holy mother of god.

[The Wizard Joseph]

I know that I said I was done, but I want to note two incongruous facts that you all can go google for yourselves if you doubt me.

1. The 'Rona is actually a chimera of two different coronaviruses, the first time such has ever been seen in "nature".

2. She's got NO recombination in her genome despite being a retrovirus. That means that it has never jumped species or genetically combined despite being a first of its kind "natural" viral chimera. .

I'm just gonna drop it again now, wouldn't want to say something stupid.

Reconcile these facts without calling it artificial, or prove them non-factual, and I'll buy you a drink when it's all over. 

[Cain]

Right, I'm going to have to step in here.

The first part is definitely a thing, but as for the second, I'm going to need you to provide sources. Because repeated scientific analysis has stated that the virus was not artifically made, outlets that have claimed so have subsequently retracted those claims after being confronted by scientists for misreading the evidence, and so far the only government source I have seen claiming otherwise is Russia.

The same Russia that has been reported as trying to use the virus to spread wider forms of misinformation on social media.

[The Wizard Joseph]

Right, I'm going to have to step in here.

The first part is definitely a thing, but as for the second, I'm going to need you to provide sources. Because repeated scientific analysis has stated that the virus was not artifically made, outlets that have claimed so have subsequently retracted those claims after being confronted by scientists for misreading the evidence, and so far the only government source I have seen claiming otherwise is Russia.

The same Russia that has been reported as trying to use the virus to spread wider forms of misinformation on social media.

Ok.

"Researchers have found that no recombination event has occurred in the genome of the new coronavirus, but there are mutations between the genomes. It is unclear whether this mutation will affect the activity of the new coronavirus and it needs to be verified by other professionals in proteomics and structural biology. ."

That's a direct copypasta from the article including the strangely Harry Potter like double period at the end.

https://recombinomics.co/topic/4895-south-china-seafood-market-in-wuhan-is-not-the-origin-of-the-new-crown-virus/?fbclid=IwAR0cfmTvvbhbEBEO9LPXNo_2HyHgDHrqgg_NveYNxYsN-5uG0oKV6Q1jd98

As for the meaning of recombination and how it occurs in retroviruses Wikipedia is pretty much accurate and a few keywords will readily do the proving.

Russia may be, FAR FROM UNIQUELY, profoundly deceptive, but maybe, just maybe, the truth is far worse than any lie they might tell amd so they're just calling it like it is in this case. Just maybe.

[Cain]

China has also been accusing the US of making the virus into a weapon, and that article was initially sourced from a Chinese publication, specifically The Beijing News, whose subsidiary owners are themselves owned directly by the Chinese Communist Party.

However, researchers outside of China have studied the virus genome, and undertaken comparative studies between Covid-19 and other forms of disease that can commonly affect bats and pangolins. Their conclusions were, and I quote: ""we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes."

This is also the scientific consensus of the vast majority of international bodies, such as WHO, the CDC, and a number of national medical bodies and university-based research labs. So far, the only publications I see pushing the possibility the virus is not natural are extremely suspect, to put it mildly. The Daily Express, a purveyor of crank material daily in the UK, and widely considered less reliable than the Daily Mail, no mean feat in and of itself. Publications with links to the Chinese or Russian governments. And far-right troll factories like Breitbart, who would love to blame China because they believe the US needs to go to war with China to maintain primary in the 21st century.

I really hope you are not sharing this disinformation elsewhere.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I don't see what the point would be of engineering this virus anyway. It doesn't kill enough people to be a threat to the species, but it's extremely effective at ruining the economies that support anything a bad actor could stand to gain. Personally it seems to me that identifying this pathogen as being manufactured only serves to inspire a hunt for a human or set of humans to blame for all this carnage, and that kind of motive is a lot more plausible than creating this virus in a lab.

[Doktor Howl]

This isn't man made.  There is precisely zero chance of that being the case.

You are processing and spreading bad signal.

[minuspace]

My ignorance of the subject does not allow me to fully understand the question, so in an attempt to educate myself about the nCoV's genetically synthetic qualities, I enlist some Chinese propaganda I found in Nature

Further analysis indicates that some of the 2019-nCoV genes shared less than 80% nucleotide sequence identity to SARS-CoV. However, the amino acid sequences of the seven conserved replicase domains in ORF1ab that were used for CoV species classification were 94.4% identical between 2019-nCoV and SARS-CoV, suggesting that the two viruses belong to the same species, SARSr-CoV.


We then found that a short region of RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) from a bat coronavirus (BatCoV RaTG13)—which was previously detected in Rhinolophus affinis from Yunnan province—showed high sequence identity to 2019-nCoV. We carried out full-length sequencing on this RNA sample (GISAID accession number EPI_ISL_402131). Simplot analysis showed that 2019-nCoV was highly similar throughout the genome to RaTG13 (Fig. 1c), with an overall genome sequence identity of 96.2%.

— httpx://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7


don't know no microbiology
and don't want no drink
still
that variance made me think

[Doktor Howl]

Fuck's sake.