January 26, 2020

A Few Viral Videos (Updated)

Ben Kavanaugh, An English-teacher from Ireland goes to buy groceries in Wuhan.


The bit about the goggles is probably good advice.

This below seems to be the full version of "The Nurse's Video"; the video that caused much of the online hysteria yesterday. Epoch Times has a slant to be sure, but they don't (to the best of my knowledge) make things up whole cloth. It's unclear why she would give the interview in a hazmat suit. I don't know who she is and even if I did I've seen enough Downfall parodies to know that I'd want someone with a good knowledge of Mandarin I trust to translate this.



Nevertheless, the uncertain provenance notwithstanding, nothing she says is out of line with what we know about the bug and it jives well with the analysis of experts in the U.K. The wildly divergent numbers with respect to the ones provided by the C.C.P.
might not be remarkable either if the C.C.P. numbers are confirmed cases and the numbers 'Mystery Nurse' provides are of those estimated to be infected but not symptomatic yet.

Styxhexxenhammer has thoughts on the matter:


 As he notes above, It is reported here (via U.K.Channel 4)  this morning by the Chinese Government that the virus is getting "stronger" though it's unclear if that means in lethality or virulence (or both).



More here.

Regarding the suspicions in some quarters about the fact that there is a government bio-research lab studying the most .dangerous pathogens in the middle of 'City Zero' ; Well, it turns out that serious concerns were raised about the then-under-construction Wuhan lab in 2017. Note too that there were 2 earlier containment failures with the less dangerous SARS virus in a Beijing lab about a decade ago. One involved a protocol issue and one involved an attempted live virus vaccine that had not, in fact, been rendered fully safe. None of this is strictly relevant to the current situation, it doesn't matter if the virus came from a botched experiment, a snake, a bat, genetic recombination at the local bathhouse, or the crashed satellite from project Scoop. It exists and appears to be real despite some obvious hype.

The thing is, we don't know what we don't know, about the actual mortality rate, and transmissability, though the latter seems to be alarmingly high given the measures taken by the powers that be. These quarantines are not taken lightly after all. This could be, in ascending levels of undesirability: hype,  SARS, a bad flu season, 1918, or North America 1545-1610.

I'm betting on a bad flu season none of us has the shot for, so I'd suggest having a lot of canned goods and buying some mas....oh.

UPDATE:
Via Instapundit, John's Hopkins University has put together a CoronaVirus tracking page, with a lot of data.



And now I've even included the links! 

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January 17, 2020

Well This Was...Not Expected.

One of The Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes brings us news from the cutting edges of Materials Science.

"And Biology. And Architecture. And Structural Engineering. And Invasive Species Management."

Rio Futaba by RB2. Who is also on Twitter and accepting commissions on Skeb.

You see...Living Concrete has reportedly been created by an insufficiently supervised team of scientists at the University of Colorado at...um...Boulder.

They have a paper.

As we approach the third decade of the 21st century we should not be surprised to see science fiction become science fact...but we at Brickmuppet Blog express our consternation that instead of flying cars, our scientists are pursuing Monolith Monsters.   



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