SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Better stop liking posts like that! Else there will be more.

"Some chunk of that DNA is selected for future use." @239. Quite a few corona viruses have been sequenced including our new contestant here. That 'chunk' corresponds to a sequence that this one has and the other ones lack. I want to say it's 193 base pairs long but perhaps I'm jumbling my sources.

Virus vaccines are mostly based on surface proteins; their grappling hooks for the cell that is to become new factory. Here we have a new category. Using the 'instruction set' (here RNA) is a different way and involves two other entities. It only became feasible with new toolbox. Speed at which all this can be done is very 21st century, but animal-model and human trials go at traditional speeds.

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There will be other newly emerging viral zoonoses, how could there not? This toolbox and companies that are now sharpening their tools will be involved.

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So, market survey: Would you take one (or more) vaccine injections for year-to-decade defense against 'the common cold*'? They could be inexpensive (compared to e.g. flu vaccine grown in chicken eggs). They would depend on multiple insertions of viral nucleic-acid sequences into plasmids of some handy bacteria.
AFAIK nobody is doing multiple insertions yet. Not that they'd surely say so.

*4 corona viruses and hundreds of rhinovirus and cocksackie virus

 

Reporting of total cases has had some changes in definition. It's lumpy and thus hard to draw conclusions worth extrapolating.

Reporting of new confirmed cases (first by ncov and carried on by WHO) has been slowing since sitrep 17, Feb 6. A linear extrapolation of that trend becomes negative after Feb 23. Simplest interpretation of that is no new confirmed cases after that, but should be regarded with great caution.

A different extrapolation appeals to me more. It is straightforward to know when a patient dies, and perhaps not much harder to call others recovered. With the ever-present caution that neither may be completely accurate, they are more tractable to count than 'cases'. The derived metric (as a second-order polynomial) reaches 1, 40 days after Feb 2. March 13 in a leap year. It means recoveries 'catch' dead by then and later exceed. While this is the most hopeful thing I can present now, It should not be taken as certainty that mid-March is ding ding ding. The resulting #dead is more than twice current number and I am not inclined to say more now.

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Reported on Chinese television, and perhaps not elsewhere, is that those recovered are being asked to donate blood plasma. It containing antibodies made by them. Spin out red blood cells (to avoid that mismatching), and inject into other patients (presumably the severe ones). It is reported to be very helpful. Anyway, to the extent that ex-sickies are willing to undergo such draining, their blood plasma is sure to be in high demand. Yes, I realize that it would properly be tested for many other diseases before use, but things are on a wartime footing at present. If no one contracts Hepatitis C (to name one example) from this, it would be great.

 

link @252 has in comments
Corona virus

Which looks like my 'modeling' but done by qualified person. Enlightening and humbling.

 

WHO sitrep 28 (today) begins including only the more comprehensive (larger) measure of confirmed cases.