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COVID-19

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 10:33 am
by lpm
Self-splitting from the veganism thread. Basically these viruses are caused by mass meat consumption. Is it possible to still eat meat but change practices enough to prevent diseases like this emerging?

- appears to have human-to-human transmission, contrary to China's claims.
- has spread to places like Philippines where tracking is even more challenging
- Chinese New Year travel coming up

Where there's 7 known coronaviruses, presumably there are really hundreds? With negligible symptoms or mistaken for common cold?

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 12:58 pm
by Boustrophedon
lpm wrote:
Tue Jan 21, 2020 10:33 am
Basically these viruses are caused by mass meat consumption.
You'll have to give a source for that assertion to be taken seriously.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 1:10 pm
by OneOffDave
Boustrophedon wrote:
Tue Jan 21, 2020 12:58 pm
lpm wrote:
Tue Jan 21, 2020 10:33 am
Basically these viruses are caused by mass meat consumption.
You'll have to give a source for that assertion to be taken seriously.
And doesn't explain it's existence in cats

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 1:24 pm
by plodder
??? Cats eat mass produced meat every day of their lives.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 1:27 pm
by OneOffDave
plodder wrote:
Tue Jan 21, 2020 1:24 pm
??? Cats eat mass produced meat every day of their lives.
Not in feral populations

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 1:31 pm
by plodder
OK, so feral cats eat organic meat, or at least free-range. So what?

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 1:34 pm
by lpm
What the f.ck?

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 1:35 pm
by lpm
"New viruses don't come out of China's meat markets because cats."

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 2:21 pm
by Pucksoppet
New viruses that can infect humans are hypothesised to arise more frequently when humans and animals live in close, unsanitary, contact with each other. It is not the mass meat market per se, but the economic benefits assumed to be achievable by small livestock operations in China.
Enforcing good animal husbandry regulations would help, as would basic hygiene.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 2:51 pm
by OneOffDave
Pucksoppet wrote:
Tue Jan 21, 2020 2:21 pm
New viruses that can infect humans are hypothesised to arise more frequently when humans and animals live in close, unsanitary, contact with each other. It is not the mass meat market per se, but the economic benefits assumed to be achievable by small livestock operations in China.
Enforcing good animal husbandry regulations would help, as would basic hygiene.
This is exactly it. It's not mass production processes or there'd be new coronaviruses popping up all over Norfolk all the time. It's the close proximity of humans to the livestock and the prevalence of large numbers of small producers with wild birds mixing freely with livestock enabling mixing between populations. Biosecurity between those raising animals is almost non-existent.From the latest information I've seen there's no identification of a reservoir yet although the Seafood Market is the main suspect.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 3:23 pm
by lpm
That our meat farming and consumption has cost us a huge toll in disease is pretty well established, so it was a surprise to see you dispute it. A Homo sapiens species that evolved to be vegan almost certainly wouldn't have had such a range of stuff like mumps, polio, measles - all from prehistory, possibly all the way back to Africa / early middle east. When we began farming we got diseases from rodent pests, which wouldn't have been avoided, but keeping chickens and pigs alongside us massively ramped up the potential for crossover. By the time of Ancient Egypt there started to be proper epidemics. By Ancient Rome there were pandemics across continents.

Today we think of China for highly dense populations living closely alongside their meat, but across history plenty more viruses emerged from the same cause in Europe, Africa and India.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 3:58 pm
by OneOffDave
lpm wrote:
Tue Jan 21, 2020 3:23 pm
That our meat farming and consumption has cost us a huge toll in disease is pretty well established, so it was a surprise to see you dispute it. A Homo sapiens species that evolved to be vegan almost certainly wouldn't have had such a range of stuff like mumps, polio, measles - all from prehistory, possibly all the way back to Africa / early middle east. When we began farming we got diseases from rodent pests, which wouldn't have been avoided, but keeping chickens and pigs alongside us massively ramped up the potential for crossover. By the time of Ancient Egypt there started to be proper epidemics. By Ancient Rome there were pandemics across continents.

Today we think of China for highly dense populations living closely alongside their meat, but across history plenty more viruses emerged from the same cause in Europe, Africa and India.
Have you got a source for the ancient Egyptians eating a lot of meat? As far as I can find they were effectively vegetarian. The massive changes that the Egyptians and Romans brought were about population density and increased speed on communications. It became possible to travel significant distances within incubation periods compared to earlier times. No matter how infectious a disease, if you don't have travelling populations, you won't get a pandemic of it.

There appears to be little evidence for mixing and cross infection with Y pestis in pigs, with rodents remaining the main reservoir and carnivorous animals, esp cats and to a much lesser extent dogs being likely to pass it on to humans.

Variola only infects humans in nature so can't mix in animal populations

Had we evolved purely vegan then we'd probably have never expanded north of about 44N as it's effectively impossible to live on a vegan diet above that latitude year round without importing foodstuffs

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 4:45 pm
by lpm
Different things apply for animal-to-human and human-to-human transmission. Obviously epidemics only started once humans got to dense populations and quick communications, enabling human-to-human disease to spread, i.e. Ancient Egypt. But animal-to-human would have happened continually in the neolithic - a couple of people die from flu off their chickens, the disease hits a dead end.

This on Egyptian foods says they invented foie gras, keeping birds from 2,500 BCE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_cuisine

This is the most respected academic analysis of their cattle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51f9uEYGeKw

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 5:24 pm
by plodder
holy crap, I'm not arguing with that second one.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 10:50 pm
by mikeh
Also rocked up in the States now. Will no doubt feed nicely into Trump's upcoming social media activity.
lpm wrote:
Tue Jan 21, 2020 10:33 am
Where there's 7 known coronaviruses, presumably there are really hundreds? With negligible symptoms or mistaken for common cold?
Probably. The ones we know about are common enough, outside of camels (MERS), civet cats (SARS) and their ending up in humans. Previous Chinese study detected 2% prevalence in respiratory infection cases they looked at, 12% in France and 1% in Kenya, and plenty hanging around in UK children in the 1980s.
Plenty of asymptomatic infection too, for example see healthcare workers from the SARS outbreak. Similar with MERS too.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2020 2:42 pm
by lpm
If the official China figures are 17 dead and 444 cases, is there anyway of guessing the actual figures? 4% fatality must be too high, more like 0.4%?

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2020 3:04 pm
by jimbob
A Chinese colleague, over here for the year, says that Chinese social media is reporting lots more cases and fatalities before the posts get taken down.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2020 3:24 pm
by mikeh
lpm wrote:
Wed Jan 22, 2020 2:42 pm
If the official China figures are 17 dead and 444 cases, is there anyway of guessing the actual figures? 4% fatality must be too high, more like 0.4%?
On the phone so my efforts to go and look this up are limited. But as it's something brand spanking new in the grand scheme of things, there may not be modeling yet that is really likely to be reliable.
I'll hazard a guess we'll see a case fatality rate of around 2%. Doesn't really seem to be as bad as SARS which was about 10%.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2020 5:32 pm
by mikeh
So the basic reproduction number (how many people you going to infect with your germs then eh?) for flu is typically between 1.5 and 2.
So 2 people per cases in the peak of outbreaks.

Ebola is usually about 2. Measles about 15 or so. Coronaviruses have previously been pretty high, MERS in South Korea measured at 8. SARS estimates seem to vary quite a lot, but median appears to be about 2.

Therefore, assuming this human to human transmission activity takes off as effectively as the planes out of Wuhan airport, then if there were a basic reproduction number of at least 2 and maybe fair bit higher, then likelihood is a ton of cases in China, fair few around SE Asia, and sporadic imported cases into most countries.
UK universities will have many of their students heading to and back from China over the next week.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2020 5:43 pm
by mikeh
New paper out in China CDC. Short summary is no animal source detected as yet, though plenty of positive environmental samples in the seafood market.
No children infected in Wuhan (age range 26-89 years), that's surprising
And 51% of cases not visited the seafood market nor seemingly had contact with other patients.

It's epidemiologically fascinating.
http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id ... 57adb77b57

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2020 11:23 am
by lpm
The death toll from quarantining 2 cities with 18 million people must be big?

I guess evacuations are much more deadly than telling people to stay put - Fukushima deaths from evacuation exceeded those from radioactivity. But whenever people are disrupted and afraid, there are excess deaths? Suicides, isolated elderly, disruption to people getting their prescriptions, people refusing to go to A&E?

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2020 11:25 am
by FlammableFlower
lpm wrote:
Thu Jan 23, 2020 11:23 am
The death toll from quarantining 2 cities with 18 million people must be big?

I guess evacuations are much more deadly than telling people to stay put - Fukushima deaths from evacuation exceeded those from radioactivity. But whenever people are disrupted and afraid, there are excess deaths? Suicides, isolated elderly, disruption to people getting their prescriptions, people refusing to go to A&E?
Supermarket shelves are empty and the populations of the cities aren't in exactly the best mood now they're quarantined.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2020 12:01 pm
by mikeh
3 cities now, approx 20 million population. And probably more to follow before the end of the day.

The consequences of doing this are going to be extraordinary. Maybe (but probably not) they've saved the world a lethal pandemic. But for sure the figures in the next report of the China burden of disease dataset are going to be somewhat elevated.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2020 12:56 pm
by Woodchopper
Several people who have died from a new virus in China did not display symptoms of fever, potentially complicating global efforts to check for infected travellers as they arrive at airports and other travel hubs.
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east- ... -to-detect

Which will make screening people before they get on flights much more difficult.

Re: Wuhan Coronavirus

Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2020 3:01 pm
by Bird on a Fire
Re: meat consumption - the outbreak's origin seems to have been confirmed as (marine) meat. The WHO has confirmed that the seafood market is the likely origin https://www.undercurrentnews.com/2020/0 ... -who-says/

The Guardian explains here that the origin may be seafood:
What is the virus causing illness in Wuhan?

It is a novel coronavirus – that is to say, a member of the coronavirus family that has never been encountered before. Like other coronaviruses, it has come from animals – possibly seafood. Many of those infected either worked or frequently shopped in the Huanan seafood wholesale market in the centre of the Chinese city. New and troubling viruses usually originate in animal hosts. Ebola and flu are examples.
This raises questions about the relevance of husbandry. Aquaculture for (especially) shrimp is common in that part of the world, and can use sewage as a feedstock, but I've not seen any suggestion that this has contributed to the coronavirus outbreak.