Public transport lockdowns imminent and how Trump failed his nation and the World

How long SARS-CoV-2 can survive outside the human body? A sick person can cough up to 3000 droplets a time.

How long coronavirus survives, how to kill it

Coronavirus survival times:

• 3 h in water droplets
• 24 hours on cardboard
• 2-3 days on plastic and stainless-steel surfaces
  *Based on research by virologist Neeltje van Doremalen, US National Institutes of Health (NIH)

What kills the virus:

• 62% alcohol inactivates coronaviruses within a minute
• 0.5% hydrogen peroxide bleach or household bleach containing 0.1% sodium hypochlorite
• common cleaning products are also recommended as efficient

When I have read about the first few cases in Poland, tested positive just arrived from Great Britain and Germany. Confirmed cases in these countries were still small, much below 1 per 100 000. How did they catch? Reports from today:

• 4 new cases in Lithuania includin a woman who had returned from Italy, a man who had returned from Denmark, and a man in his 60s who had returned from South Africa
• 23 new cases in Kazakhstan, including a 2-year-old girl in Almaty who flew from Berlin to Minsk on March 13

5 new cases in Vietnam:

• an 18-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman who are international students returning from the UK
• a 36-year-old woman who had returned from Switzerland and Dubai
• a 28-year-old woman who had contact with previously confirmed cases
• a 21-year-old woman who had traveled to the US and Canada before returning to Vietnam

All these people spent many hours on buses, trains, and planes. With new virus survivability data, I expect more public transport will be closed around the world, and stricter hygiene rules introduced when reassumes. It also means more cleaning and related jobs.

How Trump failed his nation and the World

In 2012, Mariusz Max-Kolonko, a correspondent for Polish TV is summarizing a special report for the president of the USA. The report says about growing economical, financial and military powers of China, but also:

Before 2030, we can expect large scale virus attack, that will reach every part of the world, and kill millions of people within 6 months.

Well, mass media is not a great source of information. Let's dig in and bring big guns.

2015 - Nature: A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence

The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.
[...] Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat population.
source

The above article was published by a team from the BSL level 3 lab from the University of North Carolina. There is only a handful of BSL3 & BSL4 labs in the US. You can compare the importance of these labs to that of nuclear installations. They can research microbial threats but also research bioweapons.

After covid-19 epidemics started in China, Trump has been warned by experts, and US administration had (along China) probably the best knowledge in the world on the virus and current epidemics situation. Instead of quick actions, Trump called the epidemics a hoax as little as days ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=-YtV-dTSs7I&feature=emb_logo

As of 17/03/2020, the US reports a fairly modest number of 5723 confirmed cases (up by 1060 just today!), and they have carried out only 77 tests per million population as of 16/03/2020. For comparison, South Korea 5545 tests/million citizens, Italy 2284 tests/million, mentioned earlier Poland 208 tests/million.

Who is the hoax?

The University of North Carolina potential connection to the pandemics or lack thereof I will discuss in the future post.

Posted on 17/03/2020.