From the Daily Mail:
- Mexican and Colombian officials are investigating their countriess first possible case of the new coronavirus
- In Mexico, the patients is on the northern border state of Tamaulipa, which borders Texas
- The Colombian case concerns a 19-year-old Chinese citizen, who traveled to Bogotá from Turkey
- As of Wednesday, 531 worldwide have caught the viral illness and 17 have died
- Cases have been confirmed in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the US, which reported its first patient, a man in his 30s in Washington state, on Tuesday
- One person in Australia is reportedly in isolation and may have the virus
(Featured image is coronavirus, from the Science Photo Library.)
I… didn’t know that this was possible.
I mean, bird flu had to go from birds to pigs and gestate in pigs for a while before there was a version that could jump to humans.
(The last time we had a For Real pandemic was… what? Ebola? Killed a million. HIV/AIDS? 32 million. The 1918 Spanish Flu? 30-40 million.)
We’re due!Report
Many of the diseases that wreck humans have come from animals. We got TB after we domesticated cattle for example. HIV comes from our primate cousins, the chimpanzees.Report
Yeah, but those are mammals!Report
Virus mutation is a scary thing. I remember back when the bird flu was first a thing, people were speculating “if it mutates to jump from human to human, that might be Game Over for much of the human race.” And Swine Flu in 2009, I remember my university had us all write up plans of how we could finish the fall semester via e-mail/online stuff if the university had to shut down because of a pandemic (spoiler alert: we didn’t. I don’t think we even saw many cases of H1N1)
I’d have to go back and review viruses, it’s one set of mutations to be able to jump from animal to human (zoonotic); it’s another (IIRC) to jump from human to human.
I’m not super scared about this yet but I’d definitely cancel travel plans to a couple cities in China if I had them.Report
I’m not super scared about this yet but I’d definitely cancel travel plans to a couple cities in China if I had them.
China has blocked exit from three cities now, totaling 20 million people. I wonder how food deliveries and such are going to work, if truck drivers can’t leave after bringing in a load?Report
Yikes. Maybe they’ll do like what I read happened to households in the quarantine days, leave the stuff on the “front step” so to speak, and then leave, and people from the town have to go out and get it? I don’t even know if that’s possible.
I will add Science Twitter seems to be questioning the snake link at the moment: this is the paper I saw linked. Not sure “bats” is a happier answer, though.Report
China appears to have stopped updating the death toll yesterday.Report
On one level, this is amazing.
On another level, this is very bad.
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